True Stereoscopic 3D and 360 Spherical VR Explained

3D Stereoscopic term is a misnomer currently in VR. Two separate images, one from the right eye and one from the left eye give true stereoscopic 3D. The current majority of VR products on the market use a copy of 1 image to put in both left and right eyes to make a false stereoscopic 3D version, rather it is ‘Monoscopic’ in nature and will not give the same depth of 3D when viewed in 360 spherical VR.

360 spherical movies are not the same as VR. A spherical movie is exactly what it says it is. It's literally a movie placed onto a sphere as seen from a single point in space. The critical difference is that it's from a single point in space and to see a stereo image (like in some of the Oculus Rift examples) you need two points in space, one for each eye. The problem now is that two points in space are relative. So if you were to rotate your head you would need two new points in space to view stereo images. Even if by chance you were able to keep one eye exactly within one of the spherical movies you would still need a different point in space for the other eye to achieve full horizontal stereo imagery from all directions.

This would be like having one spherical image for one eye and then another spherical image for every possible position in space that the other eye may see when the head rotates to look around.
There are two ways to produce this effect.

1. Scan the entire environment and then build it as a fully CG model
2. Convert the spherical using modified 2D to 3D conversion techniques already used in the film industry.

The shortcoming of scanning the entire environment is that you would then have to keep an entire sequence of points for anything that was moving relative to the set. This amount of data would be very hard to handle with current technology especially when considering the latency issues that come with VR.

By comparison, conversion would be much less demanding on the hardware since you would only be playing two spherical movies instead of one. But other issues arise where the imagery directly above and below the viewer would be mono since those locations are where the spheres would overlap without being able to be in stereo.