December 03 2018, 09:49

Interestingly, why hasn’t anyone come up with a program that performs horizontal or vertical scanning of space? Imagine you have a long shelf full of products, and you want to capture it all beautifully. But you can’t step back because of the wall. Ideally, you’d take your phone in your hands and walk from one end to the other. Essentially, the phone needs to stitch together a panorama, but in this case, the panorama isn’t radial as it usually is, but parallel. That is, the phone should take frames every 1/N seconds, and then stitch together the middles of the minimal possible width (the faster you move the phone, the wider it will need to capture, which can lead to distortions). You could do interesting things with this. For example, drive along the street with your phone and get a panorama of the street. Or walk along the aisles of a bookstore and get a panorama of the shelves.