CamSwarm: Instantaneous Smartphone Camera Arrays for Collaborative Photography

TL;DR

CamSwarm introduces a low-cost, collaborative smartphone camera array system enabling users to create high-quality multi-view images with real-time guidance and synchronization, expanding accessible multi-camera photography.

Contribution

It presents a novel, user-friendly platform for collaborative smartphone photography that is affordable and easy to use, unlike traditional expensive camera arrays.

Findings

Users find CamSwarm easy to operate.

Real-time guidance improves camera positioning.

System produces high-quality multi-view images.

Abstract

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.