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I'm still kind of dumbfounded that the 7 Plus has two cameras side-by-side and apparently ISN'T using them to capture 3D images. One would think this would be the best/most obvious application.


The reason for the lack of 3D is probably that the two cameras have different lenses. Once is wide angle the other is telephoto.


You can still do it, you just have to tweak your calibration parameters to accept a different focal length for the second camera. It's a huge pain but doable.


Maybe it will be another software update, or something 'software new' for the iPhone 7S or 8 like they did with live photos & the 6S.


Can the perspective difference be fixed in post? It's not going to be pretty interpolating the pixels using the other lens's data.


I think you are thinking about more traditional Lightfield cameras - this doesn't appear to be that.

It definitely won't be pretty, but whomever puts the work in will probably benefit from it somehow.


They're too close together for that. Your eyes are about 6cm (~2.4in) apart, those lenses look like they're 1cm apart. You need enough distance between them to capture stereoscopic images.


Nice opportunity there for 3rd party app makers. Presuming the RAW API or whatever it is called will let apps access the separate sensors.

That said how would the phone display the 3D image? One of those cardboard VR things? Not very Appley.


The lenses are very close together, so any 3D effect would be very subtle except perhaps in close-up/macro situations.


Remember Touch ID hardware > Apple Pay? I expect we'll see something similar with the dual cameras.

I expect either VR support, 3D imaging, or using them+dynamic light sensing of iPad Pro to have a "reactive" UI where gradients in the UI behave as if they might have real world lighting applied to them


Maybe there's only one image processor so it can't capture from both cameras simultaneously.


> One would think this would be the best/most obvious application.

Holding some features back for the next model, perhaps. They have to smooth out the 'wow factor' for each model to keep growth steady.


Couldn't they push this out as a future software update?




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