Stereoscopy

I’ve been fascinated with “eye popping” “in-your-face“3D since I was a little kid. When I was six or seven years old, The Creature From The Black Lagoon was being aired on television in 3D & the local TV station was going CRAZY hyping the hell out of it. They’re energy was contagious & I was hooked – even though the movie itself was a dissapointment (“it’s black & white! they didn’t say it was black & white!“) as was the 3D (“but I thought he’d come out of the TV!“), the idea of seeing these flat images burst into “real life” had captured my imagination. (NOTE: In the process of gathering images for this page, it has come to my attention that The Creature From The Black Lagoon is being remade & is scheduled for release in 2011).

Creature From The Black Lagoon in 3D!

Michael Jackson's Thriller 3d ViewMaster Reel

Over the years, poor kid that I was, there weren’t a lot of other opportunities to enjoy 3D. Here and there they’d crop up. I was hooked on ViewMaster Reels (still some of the finest 3D I’ve seen to date), and lucked into a few 3D postcards somewhere along the way. Sometime in the mid to late 90s I ended up at Disneyland in Anaheim, California & caught George Lucas‘ much hyped Captain EO starring Michael Jackson. The 3D was phenomenal, blowing away everything I’d seen up until then.

Captain EO

Avatar & Spiderman

Now, of course, it seems that 3D has finally found it’s place in the mainstream. Almost any action-packed blockbuster released is likely showing in 3D during it’s first few weeks. Spiderman, Harry Potter, Toy Story, Avatar, Alice In Wonderland, Clash of the Titans – all were shown in 3D. Even the upcoming Ghostbuster 3 is slated to be shot in stereoscopic 3D!

Ghostbusters 3

3D entertainment systems will soon be invading our everyday lives & living rooms! There are even televisions available that will render the illusion of depth without glasses or other cumbersome/annoying headgear to worry with!

3d Home Theater

A Depth Map

Personally, I figure by the time I’ll be able to afford such things my eyes probably won’t work well enough to see them anymore anyway, haha, so I’m still toying with my own homebrew 3D fixes in the meantime. I’ve been experimenting with converting 2D video to various forms of 3D for almost a decade now, using combinations of the Pulfrich effect, frame stuttering, and depth mapping. The results are certainly nowhere near as good as one would find with a true set of stereo images, but at times the illusion is nearly perfect.

3D Glasses (anaglyph)

Plan 9 From Outer Space

One of my more ambitious attempts was to convert the entirety of Ed Wood‘s Plan 9 From Outer Space from 2D into eye-popping 3D brilliance by depth mapping the entire movie. Unfortunately, the project proved to be a bit too ambitious for me, at least at the time. There are over 100,000 frames to be depth-mapped, and without understanding proper rotoscoping techniques I was left to create the depth maps for each and every frame by hand, a process which took hours for even a simple sequence. In the end, the project simply became far too time consuming & had to be set aside. With luck, I’ll find some time soon to study up a bit more on techniques to simplify the process… In the meantime, I’ve already decided that it would be far more fun to create a stop motion animation in 3D based on the classic horror film, Night Of The Living Dead… I have a ton of ideas for it, and just have to pull together the time/resources to make it a reality. Definitely a fun project for some day soon

Night of the Living Dead

Here is a collection of anaglyph (red / cyan) images I created myself using stereoscopic image pairs taken with my digital camera. The process of capturing the stereo pairs is fairly simple – take a picture with your right eye & then take another from your left eye, trying not to change your angle of view when you switch. It’s great for still life shots at least… Most of the images below were taken in Portland, Oregon, and a few of them were taken at my grandparent’s home in SE Texas.

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I’ve also recently begun sifting through the thousands of vintage stereocard images I’ve been hoarding & collecting over the years, and am currently converting the most interesting of them into “wiggle 3D“, an animation technique wherein the left and right stereo views are quickly swapped out creating the illusion of depth. They’re jerky and quirky, but the 3D works wonderfully well & without the need for glasses. I’ll intend to post more of these regularly, most likely in themed series’. Click the image thumbnails to view the animations.

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