VR Content Capture using Aligned Smartphones

There are a number of dedicated 3D capture devices in the market, but generally they are unaffordable and do not make use of existing smartphone cameras, which are generally of decent quality. Due to this, while there are several means to consume 3D or VR content, there is currently lack of means to capture 3D content, resulting in very few 3D videos being publicly available. Some mobile applications such as Camerada enable 3D or VR content capture by combining the output of two existing smartphones, but users would have to hold the cameras in their hand, making it difficult to align properly. In this paper we present the design of a system to enable 3D content capture using one or more smartphones, taking care of alignment issues so as to get optimal alignment of the smartphone cameras. We aim to keep the distance between the cameras constant and equal to the inter-pupillary distance of about 6.5 cm. Our solution is applicable for one, two and three smartphones. We have a mobile app to generate a template given the dimensions of the smartphones, camera positions and other specifications. The template can be printed by the user and cut out on 2D cardboard, similar to Google cardboard. Alternatively, it can be printed using a 3D printer. During video capture, with the smartphones aligned using our printed template, we capture videos which are then combined to get the optimal 3D content. We present the details of a small proof of concept implementation. Our solution would make it easier for people to use existing smartphones to generate 3D content. Keywords—3D content capture; Smartphone alignment; Virtual reality; Google cardboard