A personalised stereoscopic 3D gallery with virtual reality technology on smartphone
Virtual reality (VR) is becoming more and more popular thanks to the recent advance of smartphones and low-cost VR headsets. In this article; we propose an online system that creates a stereoscopic 3D gallery for individual use. Besides the ability to receive stereoscopic photos, the system also allows the users to upload two photos of an interested object (e.g. a personal collectable artefact) acquired by their smartphone. The photos are needed to be close to a stereo pair: i.e. the camera is slightly moved/translated to the right before acquiring the second shot. The uploaded images are automatically rectified into an epipolar stereo pair (photos will be horizontally aligned) after several corresponding points were detected. A simple stereo matching algorithm is applied to identify the average disparity range between the two photos, to generate the most comfortable VR viewable stereoscopic pictures. The system then builds a gallery with the collected photos to display 3D visualisation on VR devices such as Google Cardboard, the Samsung Gear VR or Google Daydream. This system is low-cost, portable, simple to set up and operate. With such system, Internet users all over the World could easily visualise and share their collectable items in 3D; which are believed to be useful for VR and social media community.