At their F8 conference last month, Facebook outlined a range of coming visual tools and features, which were mostly focused on the platform’s advancing AR capacity.
But there was one other note included in their ‘coming soon’ list which didn’t get a heap of attention at the time:
3D Posts in Camera: Take a 3D post from News Feed and experience it in your world with Facebook Camera on your mobile device
Of course, 3D posts didn’t get a lot of coverage because Facebook didn’t have a lot to share about them right then. But this week, TechCrunch has provided an overview of not only what the coming 3D posts in News Feed will look like, but how they’ll be generated by Facebook’s systems.
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As you can see, the new 3D posts will provide a level of depth to posted images, and will respond when you scroll past or angle your phone. And they look impressive, adding another element to your images – but it’s how Facebook will build these new images that’s most interesting.
Through a complex process of image layering and data-mapping (you can read all about it here), Facebook’s process uses the dual camera set-up of most modern smartphones to create these 3D images, without any extra effort on the part of the creator.
As explained by TechCrunch:
“The phone’s two cameras take a pair of images, and immediately the device does its own work to calculate a “depth map” from them, an image encoding the calculated distance of everything in the frame.”
That’s the simplified explanation – you can see more of the process in action here:
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Source: Social Media Today