How long a lens can a 360 camera fake by cropping into a reel, and what perspective can no crop fake?

What it found

Pixel and perspective geometry for the simplest multi-angle rig, a 360 camera on a pole reframed in software. An 8K (7,680 px) equirect cropped into a 1080×1920 vertical reel is native only up to about 24 mm full-frame-equivalent; 50 mm is upscaled 2.1× and 85 mm 3.5×, and a native 85 mm crop would need a ~27,000 px equirect. Perspective is set by distance: from a stick at 0.8 m a feature 10 cm nearer the lens images 14% larger, against 7.6% from the 1.4 m an 85 mm head-and-shoulders shot is taken at, with the background 1.7× larger. So portrait and compressed-background shots need a camera standing back, whatever the resolution. Upper bounds from pixel counts (real cameras resolve less); framing distances and depths are stated assumptions.

A figure from its own output

Paper, code and results

• README and method
• Experiments and results
• Code
• Tests

More in Autonomous multi-angle capture

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Other research topics

Proper scoring & elicitation28Effort & peer prediction9Verification games & slashing19Detection & tolerances14Markets as routers13Prediction-market design9Paying contributors8Decentralised training systems23Digital twins & sim-to-real164LLM chip design loops40Robot manufacturing loops53Ambient AI assistant46Self-replicating manufacturing34Simulation-first design64Engineered clothing45Task-specific AI accelerators40Algorithmic chip-design loops42Open-source purpose-built robots44The software-engineering loop43Adversarial human imitation41Open-source residential construction41Autonomous multi-angle capture34Sensing, imaging and 3D31Energy supply and dense energy storage39Robot societies among people31Agentic co-design of low-cost robots27Laundry-hanging robots25Machine learning on qualitative data23Robots on the building site27Civilizations & group psychology1History & human sciences1

Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.