3D Light Painting with StereoPi

StereoPi is a system created by virt2real, enabling creators to take 3D photos – or any other two-camera application for Raspberry Pi.

Results

Last things first – here are a couple of my favorite test images. Try them at different sizes and distances to get it to work. Here's a guide from the Stereoscopic Society – scroll down to "Notes on the practicalities of viewing side by side images" for some good tips.

Coding it up

I used an SD card installed with Raspbian Stretch (using this command to check, since I'd forgotten).

The OS comes with a command, "raspistill", for taking photos with the camera(s). Here is the command I ended up using:

raspistill -3d sbs -w 1280 -h 480 -ISO 20 -ss 2000000 -br 80 -co 100 -o i1.jpg

• -3d = stereoscopic 3d mode
• sbs = side-by-side stereo mode
• -ss = shutter speed, in microseconds
• -br = image brightness, 0 to 100
• -co = contrast, -100 to 100
• -o = output filename
• I might add -3dswap to swap the L/R images; depending on the method you use to view stereoscopic 3D images, you probably prefer one orientation or the other. If you get the two images to overlap in your field of view, and it looks "off" – like the distant things are close, and the nearby objects are farther away – try swapping them in an image editor, and see if that helps.

Note that this works best in dim conditions, like late at night. If there's too much ambient light, you'll blow out the sensor and won't get a good picture.

Build Video

Watch the full build and test (warning: late-night Alex personality / extreme enthusiasm):

Resources

Thread with a couple of basic commands, from the creator: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=216940

* Note: I built this back in May 2019 (about 9 months before writing this tutorial). If you have specific questions, I'll do my best to help! But I wrote it up because I'm about to overwrite the OS and do another project with it. Thanks for understanding :)