CamSwarm: Instantaneous Smartphone Camera Arrays for Collaborative Photography
This provides an accessible alternative to professional camera arrays for consumers, enabling collaborative photography experiences, though it is incremental in adapting existing array concepts to mobile devices.
The paper tackles the problem of expensive camera arrays for special visual effects by proposing CamSwarm, a low-cost system using smartphones to create collaborative photography platforms, achieving high-quality results suitable for non-professional use as shown in user studies.
Camera arrays (CamArrays) are widely used in commercial filming projects for achieving special visual effects such as bullet time effect, but are very expensive to set up. We propose CamSwarm, a low-cost and lightweight alternative to professional CamArrays for consumer applications. It allows the construction of a collaborative photography platform from multiple mobile devices anywhere and anytime, enabling new capturing and editing experiences that a single camera cannot provide. Our system allows easy team formation; uses real-time visualization and feedback to guide camera positioning; provides a mechanism for synchronized capturing; and finally allows the user to efficiently browse and edit the captured imagery. Our user study suggests that CamSwarm is easy to use; the provided real-time guidance is helpful; and the full system achieves high quality results promising for non-professional use. A demo video is provided at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgkHcvcyTTM.