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How To See In 3D On Your iPhone
waderoush writes "Some of the coolest media technologies predate the Web and the PC — in fact, they predate the 20th century. My column in Xconomy explores the world of 19th-century stereoscopes and stereo views, which are the all-but-forgotten forerunners to anaglyphic 3D, VR goggles, and other modern stereo vision systems. As it turns out, it's pretty easy to 'free-view' vintage stereo images on an iPhone or other small screen, getting the full 3-D effect without any other viewing aids. The article has instructions for accessing a collection of old stereo images using the new Seadragon Mobile iPhone app from Microsoft Live Labs." The stereoscope, that killer technology of the last century but one, was invented in 1859 by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., who gave it away and never made a dime off it. If you don't have an iPhone and want to get the feel of free viewing on a computer monitor, start here at Roush's Flickr photostream.
Show me some titties!
I have a view-master that I use to look at all the old photos of dinosaurs and other documentary images such as popeye and three little pigs.
The poster shows a bunch of stereo cards, that can obstensibly be shown in 3d on the Iphone.. a pretty cool idea
He adds a tutorial, also a nice touch..
But the Tutorial is for cross eyed viewing, probably the easiest way to view pair images..
However he has the images as straight view images, not crosseyed.. so the 3d effect is inverted.. which is ugly. he could swap the sides, and it will work.. and on an Iphone the images are still small enough to pull a wall-eyed stereo view.. but it takes more skill to master, and image center to center has to be less than the distance between your eyes... otherwise you have to super-paralax.. or get your eyes to spread... it isnt something easy, I've tried.
Anyway the instructions are bad for the images he's showing..
Storm
"The stereoscope, that killer technology of the last century but one, was invented in 1859 by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., who gave it away and never made a dime off it."
And it would have expired by 1923 so what would your point be? What if he did make money off it? It would be irrelevant to us.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Show me some 3D titties!
... because everyone knows pirates have only one eye, you ignorant clod!
$200 Viewmaster?!
-click-
-click-
Oooh, Mount Rushmore...
They've got nekkid people too.
http://starosta.com/3dshowcase/inude.html
Too much eye-crossing for me, though.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
You mean there were crosseyed people back before the 20th century? I have a feeling tomorrow microsoft's team of lawyers will begin to patent a process enabling a user to cross their eyes for a 3d operating system to compete with Apple's. I still like wikipedia's example better they have nice yellow dots you can use to calibrate your eyes to. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:XEyeStCdNYCSmall.jpg
you insensitive clod! I have a lazy eye! ...and astigmatism ...and nystagmus ...and a Blackberry, not an iPhone ...and I'm drunk as shit ...and I'll shut up now and pass out
Thanks. I'll be here all week. Try the fish.
Or you could just play 0verkill (great ASCII art shooting game) with the -3 flag.
Oooh, 3D on your iPhone!! *stroke* *stroke*
FFS! shouldn't this shit be in the idle section of slashdot?
What an extremely crappy article. The title makes you expect a nifty program for the iPhone to watch 3D images, and it turns out you can view these images in a not-too-good way on any screen and even on paper! You need an iPhone because of its high resolution screen?! Apple fanboi I say.
-- Cheers!
If you want a much more comfortable viewing experience for a little bit of money, I recommend the Pokescope viewer. It's a marvelous little invention that not only has an ingenious folding design, but uses prisms instead of lenses so there's infinite focus.
I find free-viewing either parallel or cross-eye to be horrible and headache inducing. It's the same technique that's used to view those stereo scramble posters that were unfortunately popular for a while. It took a long time before I got the technique down, and I always hated it.
I spent years messing around with LCD shutter glasses and high end CRTs, but find for casual viewing the Pokescope is great.
Now that LCD panels are creeping back into the 120hz refresh range and with shorter persistence, LCD shutterglasses will once again become easier to use, but they remain expensive as they are not passive.
The best digital stereo display I ever saw was a prototype from Kodak at Siggraph maybe 5 years ago. They set up a pair of screens inside a box with a lensing and mirroring system as such that your eyes were relaxed and focused on infinity when viewing. It was a very expensive, high end device, but if you delt with stereo photography for a living, it would be a nice thing to have. I don't know that they ever made a product out of it.
Some folks in SF also came up with a method for printing polarized 3D images on an inkjet, was called stereojet. You could view the prints or backlit transparencies with passive polarized 3D glasses. I envisioned doing an art gallery show with all stereo prints, but the costs and time involved were too great for me at the time. I don't know if they are still offering stereojet printing services.
Yeah... this is stuff every nerd kid did... a lot. Maybe that's why we all wear glasses. Remember when the 3d random dot patterns were all the rage? Those were a bit more tricky to "see."
A neat think you can do with a digital camera is make your own steroscopic pictures. I did it myself just a couple months ago -- a good technique is to put your digicam with its back against a ruler, and fix the ruler in place. Take one picture of the scene, and with the ruler still fixed, move your camera several inches to the right. Then take the next picture.
Put the two images next to each other on your computer monitor, cross eyes, and instant 3D representation of the scene. Just like your own eyes! You can experiment with changing the depth of focus, etc. I found that it works best with a very large depth of focus -- otherwise you would get weird effects due to the fact you in effect had a "infinity focus" by not changing your camera angle during the translation to create the 3d effect.
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
After Harold Lloyd (of silent film fame) retired, he took hundreds of stereo pictures of famous actresses, including many of Marylin Monroe. You can even get a book containing some of his work.
There are two problems with stereo images though.
1. There are no digital stereo cameras available. (you can make one of course but that's enough to put most people off)
2. There is no nice way of viewing them digitally. (not everyone can do freeviewing, and even when you can its a bit awkward)
If only some company would make a cheap digital 3D Camera and some kind of digital viewmaster to view the results.
Trying to get my poor eyes to split-focus on those makes my eyes feel like they haven't felt since my first goatse click.
And Please, God, let there NOT be a 3D goatse in cyberland somewhere.
Table-ized A.I.
The OP writes "The stereoscope, that killer technology of the last century but one, was invented in 1859 by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr."
This is incorrect.
While Holmes popularized stereoscopy in America by creating libraries of stereoscope slides and his own hand-held viewer, Sir William Brewster invented the lenticular stereoscope (a simple viewer) in 1850, and known stereoscopes date back to the early 1840s. Notably, this is only shortly after Daguerreâ(TM)s first daguerreotype in 1937 (The first fixed image that didn't fade and needed less than a 30 min exposure).
Not trying to troll, just credit where it's due...
cheers!
Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody... - Dick Armey
I find stereoscopic "wiggle-grams" more convenient and have almost the same effect:
http://www.well.com/~jimg/stereo/stereo_list.html
(Apologies for the nudity.)
Table-ized A.I.
I wouldn't expect MS to show any love for Google's Android. I find it amusing though that MS Labs is developing applications for the iPhone and ignoring their own Windows Mobile OS...
Perhaps that's another sign I should flash my WM6 phone to run Linux/Android....
These have been around for years. I've even made my own both with photos and 3D software. And what does this have to do with an iPhone? All you need is a device that can display an image. Also, some of those images might be the wrong way around for cross-eyed viewing, which I think is easier than parallel viewing. Don't get me wrong, I love stereo imaging, but this story is just crap.
Yeah, right. Wait until you turn 42 and then do this. "Hold it 8 inches from your face", my arse. Just a blurry blob at that distance to my 48 year old peepers.
Wow, stereoscopy is news!? Can't wait until I read some news about the printed press. It's about time this thing comes about, my scribes who translated my HTTP packets into hand-written letters are pretty expensive and slow. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some daguerreotypes to post on flickr.
You just got troll'd!
You get a panel for your phone, and their software interleaves the pixels so one eye gets one picture, the other eye gets the other picture, and you don't have to go crosseyed to see it.
http://www.spatialview.com/en/node/458
WRONG!
Sir Charles Wheatstone (as in Wheatstone Bridge) invented the Wheatstone Stereoscope before Sir. David Brewster developed the lens system attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Of course as with the computer, GUI, MP3 player, and cell phone, the stereoscope was actually invented by Steve Jobs.
I never knew of the technique listed here, and needless to say I am awed, I just spent the last hour and a half looking up stereoscopic images. Thank you for introducing me to this!
Anybody who is serious about working with 3D data learns to view 3D images by crossing their eyes. And, no, you don't need an iPhone to do it.
3D in phone is already done, right?
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7209269.html
Yup. In 1934, Wheatstone demonstrated stereo using hand drawn figures. He then got onto his friend Fox Talbot, and they made stereo pictures. Perhaps there was only six months between the arrival of practical photography in Britain and experiments with 3D. It was sxhibited in 1838,
In Europe, Duboscq developed viewers that showed transparency stereo pairs. These became popular ince Queen Victoria had been presented with a model at the Crystal Palace exhibition.
The Holmes stereoscope was a simpler instrument without optics, and it used reflection images. These gave less intense images, but the stereoscopes and the images could be mass produced. You still find them in US junk shops. Holmes didn't invent stereography any more than Eastman invented photography or Ford invented the car. But he did make them popular in the US.
It should be noted he was a famous physician and author; penning not only a number of important medical articles but poems as well (including "Old Ironsides.") His son Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr was a famous American jurist.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr appears to be another of those New Englanders whose interests spanned a variety of topics and who had the money to follow their interests. Thoreau springs to mind as another.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
A company called Spatial View is creating an auto-stereoscopic display, called 3dSheel for the iphone. So you have to purchase their screen, but it'll let you view stereoscopic images with out crossing your eyes, or wearing 3d glasses.
http://www.spatialview.com/en/node/464
...you insensitive clod.
I'm the author of the original article. Several commenters here have pointed out that the tutorial that I originally cited in the article was about cross-eye stereo viewing (in which the right image is intended for the left eye, and the left image is intended for the right eye), whereas these 19th-century stereographs are designed for parallel viewing (in which the left image is the for the left eye, etc.). That's absolutely correct -- my mistake. I've revised the article to link to a different tutorial, on parallel free-viewing. I've never actually tried cross-eye viewing, which sounds a lot harder. If you try to cross-eye free-view these images, they will indeed look inverted or flat. But once you get the trick of parallel free-viewing, the images should pop out at you, especially the best ones like the Brooklyn Bridge pictures at the beginning of the photoset.
WTF is the "but one" supposed to mean?
And isn't looking cross-eyed at things hoping to see "3d" kind of silly?
Caveat Utilitor
His Springtime Through the Branches and one of his larger water lily paintings "popped" for me this way: after looking for a while, I suddenly felt I was looking into the paintings.
And the way it happened sounds similar: I had heard that de-focusing on his paintings would make them different but equally beautiful.
The water lily painting (huge, done in dark colors, in a traveling impressionist exhibition that included works from private collections, at the LACMA in the 1980's, I can't recall anything more) just didn't look all that good to me, almost muddy-looking, so I figured there must be some reason it was there and tried that trick. A minute maybe, then, bam.
Ever since, I've tagged him as "the puzzle" because he was doing something your eye needs to figure out with eye-logic
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
The pics on the linked site are ordered such that the image on the left needs to be viewed with the left eye, etc. I can aim my eyes at the pic this way but I find it very difficult to focus.
Swapping the order of the images so that one can cross the eyes and look at the left image with the right eye and the right image with the left eye seems to be much easier.
Didn't he invent the steroscope in about 1830. Not Dr.Holmes.
Many of these images were taken with excessive spacing between the views, which makes things "pop-up" unnaturally. This is fine when used to add texture to something almost flat, at least compared to the distance from the eye to the object, but the Brooklyn pictures look particularly fake, and many others are "just wrong."
I used to do this for a living several careers ago, doing 1500x photomicrography pairs at a research lab. I have no trouble viewing, but some are not lifelike, at least defined as "as the eye would see it." An interesting collection for all of that.
When using a telephoto lens, the distance between views should be the interpupilary distance times the zoom, or 195mm for 3x zoom, as an example. Trying to show the contour of a mountain miles away, I did once use a separation of about 10m, but that was to compensate for the zoom and exaggerate the depth to locate features, and was not intended to be lifelike.