Live imaging with Google cardboard

3D viewing of live data - or perhaps timelapse video sounded fun, and I especially wanted to have a go at cloud timelapse with extra large camera spacing - since I have a great view of the sky to the north from our house.

While there is lots of content out there, and apps that do fake 3d from single photos (with much the same results as fake stereo from mono in the 1980's), there didn't seem to be much info about roll your own. Well after a few hours messing about and a lot of lessons learned things are looking pretty good.

After a bit of judicious makery, here is a snapshot of the web page that displays live images from 2 webcams. This isn't proper video, this is 1 frame per second served up by motion and stuck into a single web page using some simple html that allows some tweaking. The reason for upside down and the html is all explained below. The webcams here are 2.3m apart.

Displayed on an original Nexus 7 in Google Cardboard (painlessly extended to accept the larger device), this looks pretty good, although the screen door effect is blatant.

The standard Google app is about a 'VR experience', but I am far more interested in a straight 3d image viewer - along the lines of the old viewmasters, So I am not expecting (so far!) any ability to track head motion. While there are a couple of 'ordinary' stereo image viewers around they only work with static images - not streams.

Of course looking through 2 high magnification lenses at a phone screen 2 - 3 inches away is never going to be that wonderful, but resolution keeps improving so next year.......

Below is some detail on what I have done and how I have done it.