3D photography hot again

Slashdot has a post on World’s First 3D Webcam. There was a hands-on test of Minoru 3D webcam published on the web. That claimed be the world’s first 3D webcam allows you to takes 3D anaglyphic images that can be viewed with suitable 3D viewing glasses. That technology allows 3D videos and stereoscopic 3D video chat over the Internet. It works. there is a YouTube video at Minoru 3D webcam hands-on web page that can be viewed at 3D with suitable viewing glasses. I found some old glasses that seemed to work so well that I could say that the video worked.

The downside of the technology is that that anaglyphic photography was clearly not invented to create comfortably-viewable Internet videos (besides initial limitations the used video compression technologies can mess up the video quality). And even the anaglyphic photograps are not always nicest one to view. The problem with all 3d is that the lenses on the glasses must be calibrated to the colors on the display for optimal effect. With a properly calibrated display and some good quality glasses 3D effect using this kind of technology can give pretty amazing 3D images, although the colors you see on your eyes are not good. It also takes some calibration until the 3D effect works. For me it took moving my head to different distance from the monitor until I began to see the 3D well.

This kind of stereographic 3D approach does not work for all people and viewing this kind of 3D images can cause disconfort to some people. Stereographic images do fool your brain into getting a depth cue, and it assumes that because it gets depth cues, you should be able to get a different perspective by moving your head. This confusion fades after a short while (depends on the person), but it’ll always be there.

I played with several different 3D viewing technologies in the 1990′s and documented some 3D technologies used at that time. At that time my favourite viewing device was Sega 3D glasses connected to PC. It gave possibility to view quite nicely some 3D photographs and real-time 3D graphics. Then the interest in this type of 3D seemed to fade away for a long time. But it seems that anaglyph images have seen a recent resurgence due to the presentation of images and video on the internet, Blu-ray HD disks, and even in print. There is even a flicr group for anaglyph (Red-Cyan 3D Pictures) images.