Stereoscopic photography has a long history which started just a few years after the first known photo was taken: 1849 Sir David Brewster introduced the first binocular camera. Whereas mobile photography is omnipresent because of the wide distribution of smart phones, stereoscopic photography is only used by a very small set of enthusiasts or professional (stereo) photographers. One important aspect of professional stereoscopic photography is that the required technology is usually quite expensive. Here, we present an alternative approach, uniting easily affordable vintage analogue SLR cameras with smart phone technology to measure and predict the stereo base/camera separation as well as the focal distance to zero parallax. For this purpose, the StereoCompass app was developed which is utilizing a number of smart phone sensors, combined with a Google Maps-based distance measurement. Three application cases including red/cyan anaglyph stereo photographs are shown. More information and the app can be found at: <uri>http://stereocompass.i2d.uk</uri>
With the development of Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore, mobile augmented reality (AR) applications have become much more popular. For Android devices, ARCore provides basic motion tracking and environmental understanding. However, with current software frameworks it can be difficult to create an AR application from the ground up. Our solution is CalAR, which is a lightweight, open-source software environment to develop AR applications for Android devices, while giving the programmer full control over the phone’s resources. With CalAR, the programmer can create marker-less AR applications which run at 60 frames per second on Android smartphones. These applications can include more complex environment understanding, physical simulation, user interaction with virtual objects, and interaction between virtual objects and objects in the physical environment. With CalAR being based on CalVR, which is our multi-platform virtual reality software engine, it is possible to port CalVR applications to an AR environment on Android phones with minimal effort. We demonstrate this with the example of a spatial visualization application.