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360 Photo of cars (idea)

Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2014 5:21 pm
by mytholibar
greetings, as stated before I run a lot of races and have a great time doing it. I have dreamed for some time to create a rig in which I can pass all the cars that are going to race through. In which once they get to Spot X it fires off 4 camera's to take a 360 shot of the car. I can then add that to the web site as a historical view of the cars that have raced on the track. I don't think it could be easily done with in the racing portion of the event but could be part of the inspection process. I can kind of see and assembly line for the cars to go through for inspection, where this would be one station in the process. I know and have never used the driver photo but it might be cool to be able to capture the top view of the car for this if wanted. Would be another quick way to find/validate correct cars on track?

Just tossing out some ideas here.

Re: 360 Photo of cars (idea)

Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2014 9:02 am
by Stan Pope
Neat idea!

Re: 360 Photo of cars (idea)

Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2014 4:00 pm
by knotthed

Re: 360 Photo of cars (idea)

Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2014 8:10 am
by Jeff Piazza
A full 3D model isn't necessary, just a collection of views on the car.

Apple used to offer QuickTime VR, which let you integrate multiple images into a navigable 3D view. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime_VR#Objects. I understand HTML5 and CSS3 have some 3D/VR-oriented features, but I don't know any particulars.

http://www.ajax-zoom.com/examples/example15.php gives an idea of what might be possible with just discrete photos. All you'd really need is a turntable and a camera support. The biggest challenge would be managing/organizing the multiple images of each car.

Less ambitiously, we currently capture a single view of each car as it's checked in, using a tabletop "studio" (http://www.merax.com/products/photo/PhotoStudio.html in our case, but there appear to be lots of options in this space.) I built a simple jig to hold each car in the same place, with a place to receive a car-number label to ease identification.

Here's the jig itself: Image
and here it is in use: Image.

As the photos are taken at check-in, an Eye-Fi card (http://eye.fi) transmits them wirelessly to a laptop running a live slideshow by the track. Seems to be a real crowd-pleaser!

/JEP