Many, many years ago I was allowed to use the university’s old Wild B8S stereoplotter for different projects. It literally opened my eyes to the value of stereo viewing. In addition to the possibility of creating topographic contour lines, the identification of objects on the ground between the trees was very much easier through stereo viewing. Exact height measurements of individual rocks was suddenly possible.
Some people might remember the Viewmaster stereoscope, where you could watch pictures of tourist attractions in stereo. That was probably the most common stereoscopic instrument for the general public. Then came 3D cinema and VR glasses.
We are strong believers in the usefulness of stereo viewing also for many types of professional applications. Manual inspection, monitoring and measuring will benefit from stereo viewing. That is why I-CONIC is developing software to enable stereo viewing and measurement, primarily using video. We call it the Video Stereoscope.
The input data to the Video Stereoscope can be one normal 2D view from a moving video camera, or it can also be simultaneous video streams from two different video cameras. In either case the target is seen from different viewing angles.
To create a pleasant stereo view, the stereo pairs have to be processed through so-called epipolar resampling. All the processing in the Video Stereoscope is done in real-time, which means that it would be possible to use the technology in the field. For example, foresters working with a drone, could through their VR/AR glasses improve inspection quality or measure vegetation remotely.
