Pelican Launches 3D Image Viewer, Presents First Interactive Sample Images

It’s gotten a bit quiet around Pelican Imaging, lately. Until today, when the mobile plenoptics specialists have broken the silence and announced their own version of a WebGL light field viewer.

“What do photos with depth look like?”, the company teased in their newsletter. To answer that question, the company has published a small sample image gallery based on the new “Pelican 3D Image Viewer”, which allows users to check out and interact with 8 sample images taken with the Pelican Array Camera.

The new “Pelican 3D Image Viewer” allows users to refocus (on a click or click-and-drag basis), experience parallax (“3D Perspective”; simply move the cursor around the image), and adjust the level of blur applied to out-of-focus regions (i.e. synthetic aperture) using a slider. The additional “depth” option even gives a view of the underlying depth map.

Images in the gallery are displayed at a web-optimized resolution of 1040 x 780 pixels, while the camera actually takes a set of 16 images of 16.75 megapixels each that are then merged into an interactive 8 megapixel image.
All images presented show decent image quality that is comparable with current upper-class smartphone cameras, as is to be expected from the first official sample images. Two of the indoor shots actually suggest very nice low-light image quality as well.

If we got you interested, head over to Pelican’s new sample gallery and check out the images yourself.