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DVD Player Displays 2D Movies in 3D
Anonymous Writer writes "A company called Dynamic Digital Depth that wants to bring 3D television and movies to the mainstream claims to have developed a system that allows you to watch current 2D DVDs in 3D.
They claim the TriDef DVD Player uses image analysis methods, developed by the company for their 3D content conversion service, to convert 2D video to 3D in real-time based on 3D depth cues in the original movie.
It is the same company that produced the TriDef Movie Player software for the Sharp Actius R3D3 autostereo display notebook.
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Hmmm.. so what happens if I watch Spy Kids:3D on this? Will it upconvert me to 4D?
Hmmm.
I can't imagine what this would actually add to the viewing experience. It's a novelty at best, and a distraction from the experience as it was originally intended at worse.
I remember going to see "Jaws 3D" when it came out when I was in high school. After the first floating fish went by and you got over the urge to reach out and try to grab it... well you had 2 more hours of that. woo hoo.
Who cares?
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
To clarify my situation, I am legally blind in one eye WITH corrective lenses (20/200). The only time I've ever experienced a 3D Imax movie, I was able to see the flickering which I assume is acutally multiple projectors at different refresh rates or something similar to generate the 3D effect. Since my optic nerves didn't know how to handle that kind of image, I got a migraine that lasted for several days.
"It's a dog eat dog world out there, and I'm wearing Milk-Bone underwear."- Norm (from Cheers)
The principle seems straight forward enough. You don't have enough 3D info in a single frame, but you have lots of frames. So as objects move, or the camera pans, you can tell by their apparent positional shift how far from the observer they are. Assuming the software can recognize and track some basic objects, it can make reasonable inferences about their depth into the scene. How it then displays the depth is another issue.
There's plenty of info to construct a 3D-image. There's just not enough to construct the 3D-image.
Part of the bizplan likely involves consumers not caring.
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
Binocular disparity only works out to a few metres distance. Beyond that you use different cues. Consider some papers by my supervisor, for example: A laminar cortical model of monocular and binocular interactions in depth perception, Neural Dynamics Of 3-D Surface Perception: Figure-Ground Separation And Lightness Perception
Not really that reasonable. If you look at the results of current optical flow and disparity estimation algorithms, they're really not that great. Discontinuities of the image (edges) are a huge problem, as is the whole top-down/bottom-up/gestalt-ordeal, and these have not been solved in any satisfactory manner.
To reconstruct the 3D scene generating the 2D images is effectively to solve vision, in its entirety. In real time, no less. So I would guess that they're doing something quite simple. I'd love to see it, but the information on the site is quite scarce. I'm just hoping that someone is not manually pulling the strings behind the scenes.
I stumbled on to this by accident a while back. You're obviously familiar with those stereogram images (look at infinity and a 3D surface emerges from a bunch of "random" dots). The trick is to give each eye different information.
I wondered, instead of doing this spacially, could one do it temporially? The answer is _YES_.
Open two copies of QuickTime and load the same movie in each. Put the two windows side-by-side. Now, advance the right one just a few frames (the arrow keys can do it). Then start BOTH running at the same time. (It usually takes a mouse click in one window and a keyboard focus on the other window to get this to happen.)
Now you have the same movie running side-by-side, although one is just a little off from the other.
No cross your eyes and produce an overlay of the two images. Obviously, smaller frames are easier on the eyes. Eventually your eyes will focus on the overlap, just as it does with the posters, and you can easily hold focus.
Surprise -- the movie has DEPTH. It's in 3D.
The only thing I can figure is that each eye gets a little different signal, and your brain has to piece the information together; when it does, you get 3D.
Normally you can use the red-blue glasses, sterograms, or hidden patterns in dots to do this. You can also get a similar effect by watching television with one eye closed (you're taking cues based on shadows and such), or, by having one eye look through a darkened filter. Not sure why that happens, but I suspect the difference between the left and right eye kick in the extra steps that trick the brain.