I built a robot for this camera at the request of a stereographer friend, and I thought it was a great idea, and a great tribute to the stereoscopic associations that are still making magic today.
The first problem I had to solve was the shooting system, since this “Vintage” camera lacks wireless ports, so I had to design a mechanical trigger based on a stage wheel, activated by a servomotor.
Finding the nodal point was not difficult because of how tight this camera is.
The complicated thing was to program the software that moves the robot, as it uses 40mm optics so it need took 99 photographs to close the sphere.
Production is slow, as Fuji W3 takes quite some time to file the photo and be ready again, in total it takes about 9 minutes to complete the “Roundshoot”.
Postproduction was also slow because the “Stitching” programs had difficulty moving so much information.
Despite all the inconveniences the camera worked correctly.
This photograph is published in 360Cities.
I went back to the same point where I took the photograph, with my GEAR VR to see if the virtual reality created had the same dimensionality as the real world, and it was amazing to see how everything looks giant, you feel your self very small and the distances and heights appear at twice its size, so I realized that the interaxial distance of the Fuji W3 7.5cm is excessive, since what we are looking for is a real virtual reality experience.