Facebook first showed off its 3D photos back in 2018, and shared the technical details behind it a month later.
But unless you had one of a handful of phones with dual cameras back then (when they weren''t so common), you couldn''t make your own.
Today an update brings 3D photos to those of us still rocking a single camera.In case you don''t remember or haven''t seen one lately, the 3D photos work by analyzing a 2D picture and slicing it into a ton of layers that move separately when you tilt the phone or scroll.
I&m not a big fan of 3D anything, and I don''t even use Facebook, but the simple fact is this feature is pretty cool.The problem is it used the dual-camera feature to help the system determine distance, which informed how the picture should be sliced.
That meant I, with my beautiful iPhone SE, was out of the running — along with about a billion other people who hadn''t bought into the dual-camera thing yet.But over the last few years the computer vision team over at Facebook has been working on making it possible to do this without dual-camera input.
At last they succeeded, and this blog post explains, in terms technical enough that I&m not even going to attempt to summarize them here, just how they did it.The advances mean that many — though not all — relatively modern single-camera phones should be able to use the feature.
Google Pixel series is now supported, and single-camera iPhones from the 7 forward.
The huge diversity of Android devices makes it hard to say which will and won''t be supported — it depends on a few things not usually listed on the spec sheet — but you&ll be able to tell once your Facebook app updates and you take a picture.