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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.
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
Show me some 3D titties!
... because everyone knows pirates have only one eye, you ignorant clod!
He's basically pointed out that stereographs can be viewed without equipment by "looking through" them, and stereographs are images, and images can be digitised, and digitized images can be displayed on most modern electronics, and the iPhone is one of these. Whoot.
Damn, I already moderated this topic. Now I'll have to log in with my sock puppet to comment.
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.
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!
It's called "background information". The fact that it was invented in 1859, or that it was Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. who invented it, are equally irrelevant to us.
However, all of the above facts are interesting, including the fact that he gave it away. Good for him.
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
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.