This genius made a stereoscopic streaming camera with a Raspberry Pi 5, and so can you

With how easy it is to get into stereoscopic 3D media, it’s only natural for someone people to want to create their own videos for the format. Well, if you’re part of that camp and you have a spare Raspberry Pi 5 lying around, today’s your lucky day. This cool Raspberry Pi project lets you create a camera that streams footage in a stereoscopic format, so you can see things in 3D through visors like Google Cardboard.

This Raspberry Pi 5 project lets you create your own stereoscopic streams

As posted on Hackster.io by Sridhar Rajagopal, this project uses a Raspberry Pi 5 and two Camera Module 3s packed in a ProtoStax Enclosure and a ProtoStax Stereoscopic 3D Camera Kit. The goal of the project is to replicate how our eyes perceive 3D objects using their “interocular distance,” which is the space between each eyeball:

We can replicate this with a 3D Stereoscopic Camera, by having two cameras that are separated by roughly the interocular distance. These two images (left image and right image) are then presented individually to each eye using a stereoscopic viewer like Google Cardboard. The brain then combines these images and processes the subtle differences in perspective and angles to create depth perception, or a 3D image!

The setup looks pretty easy. Achieving the interocular distance is simpler than it sounds, thanks to the stereoscopic 3D camera kit handling all the nitty-gritty measurements for you. All you need to do is put all the parts together (which is detailed in the Hackster.io page), then grab your favorite VR viewer and check out the stream. Sridhar recommends turning the camera on your own face so you can finally see what it looks like in 3D.

If you like the idea of streaming media from your SBC but 3D imagery makes you motion sick, why not check out how to turn your Raspberry Pi into a media center?