QooCam Ego 3D Camera for Spatial Video on Apple Vision Pro

[@rexmaximilian9548]

I bought this camera back in early March for a couple of trips I was taking. My review is as follows. I would give it a 7 out of 10. The biggest drawback it has is that it takes so long to turn on and be ready to shoot. I’ve counted it out to 20 seconds. Switching between modes and doing anything takes a little bit of time as well. I take images in raw (DNG) format so I have ultimate editing power in Lightroom, the movies come out as they are though. Whenever it takes a good picture, it’s outstanding, but often times the shutter is slow and it gets a little bit of blur, or it focuses on the wrong thing and you have such a shallow depth of field. So you have to be very careful to get your subject and focus And have the exposure by a set to where the shutter will be fast enough. I’ve also noticed that the images look far better in 3D than the movies do. The movies are OK, but they just don’t have the same wow effect as the images do. The biggest plus to having this over the iPhone, if I am to understand correctly, is that the iPhone 15 Pro does not take 3D images, but 3D movies only. If they can work on their speed issues, I think this would be a winner. You can’t complain about the price though!

[@halimrahman]

Nice one. I am considering buying this camera too. What's your opinion about stabilisation when videos were recorded handheld? What about lighting in low light as I would definitely like to capture Christmas dinner and also food close-up.

[@rexmaximilian9548]

@@halimrahman unless you’re using it on a gimbal, the video is pretty shaky. It does have the “in-camera” stabilization feature that you can run on a movie after you take it. That works pretty well, but it does crop into it a little bit. As far as low-light situations, that’s the most challenging part because you have to hold it very still in order to have a sharp picture. I usually bring down the exposure bias to have a quicker shutter speed.

[@CyrilPreiss0]

thanks a lot, could you compare more the quality difference between this camera, the iphone 15 pro and the AVP ?

[@halimrahman]

Thanks for your tips. I have some questions though 1. Does it record in 4K? 2. What about stabilisation when recording handheld? 3. Will it work good for close-ups, for example: food on a plate, or flowers. 4. What about in a low light situation, can it handle it well?

[@michaellougee987]

This was a nice review of the QooCam Ego, with lots of helpful tips. I have a slightly odd question, asking about the ability of the Ego to PLAY BACK video that's been recorded on the iPhone. Because the Ego is such a bargain price compared to the AVP and the Quest3 (which can both play back iPhone spatial video, of course), it would be fun, maybe even useful, for many, if the Ego could do playback.

[@SpatialInsights]

I'm going to say that probably won't work. The Ego records videos in the side-by-side 3D format. Apple Spatial videos are a different format. I tried using the iphone app "Spatialify" to convert an iPhone spatial video to the side-by-side format. I put that file on an SD card, but the Ego camera would not see it. Maybe somebody could come up with a way to do it, but it didn't work for me. Even if it did, I don't think this would be an enjoyable way to watch your spatial videos. The 3D viewer on the Ego camera is meant to help you frame your shots or confirm how your clips look during shooting. It's not really a system to watch those videos. You wouldn't watch a movie on a camera's viewfinder.

[@michaellougee987]

​@@SpatialInsights Thanks for your quick and insightful comment. I've sent a similar question to the folks at Kandao to see what they say, and I'll post here anything that's useful. I'm trying to do some 3D/spatial things for medical education (surgical or surgical-adjacent procedures). Watching such a procedure for 2-10 minutes, and comparing the benefits of 3D vs 2D is part of what we're exploring. Using an AVP or Quest3 device is more expensive/awkward than using the simple Kandao QooCam EGO device. The EGO won't be neaarly as good, but it might be a question about whether it's "good enough" and better than 2D.

[@kieranallen1982]

@@michaellougee987 I may have a solution for you. If your goal is to simply view the spatial 3D videos, a VR phone headset may be a better option. They're a small headset that you can insert a phone into, and they're much cheaper than a full VR device as it's only a plastic holder and lens. This will also be a much better screen quality than the EGO can provide. If your goal is to capture 3D spatial video, I also believe an iPhone would be better for the use you have mentioned, rather than the EGO. As said in the video, the eye spacing is important here, as if you are concentrating on close, small objects, as you might do in a surgical video, the lenses must be closer together, otherwise a cross-eye effect will be produced as your eyes cannot put together the two videos with such different angles of a small subject.

[@michaellougee987]

@@kieranallen1982 Thanks for the reminder about the small plastic (or cardboard!) headsets for holding a phone, where the phone which is inserted into is able to play Left+Right images, which then appear in a "stereo/3D" view. Of course it's not as "gee whiz" a 3D view as the AVP or Quest3 present, but it does have a 3D quality. Also, FYI, I've been able to use my favorite editor, Camtasia, to place annotations (titles, arrows, circles, etc) onto the spatial/3D recordings, by editing the Left+Right video from Spatialify, and placing those annotations in exactly the same locations on both the Left and Right images. When later viewed in the Quest 3 or AVP (or any other 3D viewer), those annotations appear "on top" of the 3D video. In general, it's great to see people describe their successes (and problems!) in creating real-world uses for spatial/3D videos. Those videos are nice for reliving family occasions (birthday cake video that's part of Apple's AVP in-store demo), but there should be lots of other purposes for spatial/3D.

[@SjaakSchulteis]

You can shoot these videos also for the Quest 2 and 3 and several other VR headsets. The Vision Pro is not the only headset, you know?