One Camera Leaves Gaps. Five Cameras Reveal the World.
A depth camera doesn't take a photograph. It builds a world — a dense cloud of points in 3D space, each one a precise distance measurement. Every surface, every edge, every object reduced to its position in space.
It's a remarkable way to see. The problem is the gaps.
A single camera captures what's directly in front of it. Everything else — the far side of an object, the space behind a surface, anything outside its field of view — simply doesn't exist in its picture of the world. Those invisible regions aren't a minor inconvenience. They're the difference between a system that understands a scene and one that only thinks it does.
That was true right up until multi-camera fusion stopped being a research problem — for a rig with its camera poses already known, it became a setup measured in minutes.