If you never saw the 80’s classic called Crocodile Dundee you should treat yourself to an immersive experience. For me the highlight of the movie was always the knife scene (shown below). And this is exactly what I felt Carnegie Mellon’s is telling the world when showing off their 510 camera ‘bullet time’ Panoptic Studio.
The studio is built inside a geodesic dome with 480 camera placed on boards – 24 boards with 20 cameras each -in strategic locations. It has an additional 30 cameras and depth sensors to which enables the operators to record and track an almost perfect 360 degrees view of whatever is happening inside of it.
Unlike motion capture they do in Hollywood, there is no need to mark the subjects with those weird tracking dots, a fancy algorithm which takes data from the cameras and some depth sensors take care of that
But fanciness does not come without a price. Each minute takes about half a Tera of storage and the system needs 120 drives to be able to process the output fast enough. Once the data is stored it is concerted into a 3D model where a research team can analyze every little movement.
Right now the team is focused on sports, but they are excited at the options of using this studio for applications where they analyze social behavior.
Where were we? oh yea, Crocodile Dundee:
