VR Stereoscope

A simple smartphone-based stereoscope

Header Image



Usage

  1. Acquire some smartphone VR glasses. We suggest something cheap and foldable that does not obstruct your touchscreen, like the Homido Mini or Pocket 360.
  2. Launch a browser on your phone. In Android use Chrome; in iOS use Safari.
  3. Point your phone's browser to the current page, either by typing the URL or by scanning this QR code:
  4. In your phone's browser, click one of the stereo thumbnails in the galleries below
  5. Enter VR Mode by hitting the VR button and rotating your phone to landscape orientation
  6. To return to this page from VR Mode, touch your phone's screen to reveal the browser's title bar and then click the Back button


Troubleshooting:

  • If the stimulus appears blurry or strange in VR mode, make sure your VR glasses are perfectly centered and aligned on your phone. It may take some fiddling.
  • If Safari's title bar does not disappear in VR Mode, try this:
    1. Close all browser tabs except for the current page
    2. Rotate your phone to portrait orientation and then back to landscape
    3. If all else fails, you can at least reduce its size by clicking aA -> Hide Toolbar in the address bar

Gallery 1: Perceptual Stimuli

These images were invented by scientists to understand how stereo vision works in humans. The sense of depth is only apparent when they are viewed stereoscopically. In many cases, the perceived shape is strongly influenced by "unmatched features", meaning features that are visible to one eye but not the other. Beside each thumbnail is a diagram of the perceived shape relative to two eyes, with the "unmatched features" drawn in red.

Two Planes (Julesz, 1960)
Textured Planes
Textureless Background
(Tsirlin et al, 2010)
Textureless Foreground
(Tsirlin et al, 2010)
Textureless Middle Plane
(Tsirlin et al, 2010)
Textureless Plane
Recessed Cylinder
(Belhumuer, 1996)
Unpaired Bar
(Nakayama and Shimojo, 1990)
Wallpaper, Light Surround
(Anderson and Nakayama, 1994)
Wallpaper, Dark Surround
(Anderson and Nakayama, 1994)
Slanted Planes
Roof
(Belhumuer, 1996)
Cross
(Nakayama et al, 1990)
Protruding Folded Paper
(Von Szily, 1921, Ehrenstein and Gillam, 1998)
Protruding Folded Paper Alternate
(Von Szily, 1921, Ehrenstein and Gillam, 1998)
Receding Cylinders
(Von Szily, 1921, Ehrenstein and Gillam, 1998)
Protruding Cylinders
(Von Szily, 1921, Ehrenstein and Gillam, 1998)

Gallery 2: Interactive Perceptual Stimuli (Beta)

These are interactive versions, where the stimulus is meant to change as you rotate your head horizontally.


Interactive Unpaired Bar
(Nakayama and Shimojo, 1990)
Interactive Cross
(Nakayama et al, 1990)
Interactive Folded Paper
(Von Szily, 1921, Ehrenstein and Gillam, 1998)

Gallery 3: Photographs

Some examples from the Middlebury 2014 Stereo Dataset

Pipes
Jadeplant


Gallery 4: Use Your Own

View your own images stereoscopically by pasting two URLs and clicking Go.

(Higher resolution images produce a better effect but take longer to load. If your screen is persistently blank in VR mode, check the image server's access controls.)




Another way to see your own images is by passing their URLs as query strings. The syntax is
(base URL)?lImg=(left image URL)&rImg=(right image URL)

For example, an equivalent way to launch the Two Planes stimulus above is by typing
StereoPages/static.html?lImg=/stereoscope/assets/StereoImages/1_1/2048one_l.png
&rImg=/stereoscope/assets/StereoImages/1_1/2048one_r.png


Modify the VR Stereoscope

This VR Stereoscope is built in A-Frame, with contributions from Oliver Habert, Anubha Srivastava, and Jialiang Wang. The code is minimal. You can

Fork

on github or

Remix on Glitch


Research Papers

The perceptual stimuli were collected in the following papers to study perceptually-consistent computer vision stereo algorithms. Our algorithms properly use the occlusion cue, and as a result, they work in most of these stimuli whereas many state-of-the-art algorithms fail completely. However, the Wallpapers, Cross, Folded Paper and Cylinders stimuli remain open research problems.

For more, including supplementary materials, posters, data and slides, see this project page.

Toward perceptually-consistent stereo: A scanline study
Jialiang Wang, Daniel Glasner, and Todd Zickler
In Proc. International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017.

Local Detection of Stereo Occlusion Boundaries
Jialiang Wang and Todd Zickler
In Proc. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019.


References for Perceptual Stimuli

  • A. von Szily. Stereoskopische Versuche mit Schattenrissen. Albrecht von Graefes Archiv fur Ophthalmologic, 105 964-972 und Tafel VI, 1921.
  • B. Julesz. Binocular depth perception without familiarity cues. Science, 145(3630):356–362, 1964.
  • K. Nakayama and S. Shimojo. Da Vinci Stereopsis: Depth and subjective occluding contours from unpaired image points. Vision research, 30(11):1811–1825, 1990.
  • K. Nakayama and S. Shimojo. Experiencing and perceiving visual surfaces. Science, 257(5075):1357-63, 1992.
  • B.L. Anderson and K. Nakayama. Toward a general theory of stereopsis: binocular matching, occluding contours, and fusion. Psychological review, 101(3):414, 1994.
  • P.N. Belhumeur. A Bayesian approach to binocular steropsis. International Journal of Computer Vision, 19(3):237–260, 1996.
  • W.H. Ehrenstein and B.J. Gillam. Early demonstrations of subjective contours, amodal completion, and depth from half-occlusions: “Stereoscopic experiments with silhouettes” by Adolf von Szily (1921). Perception, 27(12):1407-16, 1998.
  • I. Tsirlin, L.M. Wilcox, and R.S. Allison. Monocular occlusions determine the perceived shape and depth of occluding surfaces. Journal of Vision, 10(6):11–11, 2010.