Hubble In Anaglyph Stereo 3D

rwllama writes "We at the Hubble Space Telescope have quietly released our first anaglyph (i.e. red/cyan) stereo 3D movie of a flight into a Hubble image. This work is a follow-on to the sequences we produced for the 'Hubble 3D' Imax film. Note that the 3D interpretation uses lots of artistic license, so it is not intended to be scientifically accurate. We would love to hear the Slashdot crowd's feedback on whether you want more, are artistic interpretations of scientific data acceptable, is anaglyph 3D too annoying, how many could watch this with a real 3D (e.g., NVIDIA 3D Vision) setup, etc?"

Comments

Color Blind

[Lord Byron II]

From TFA:

"Q: I am color blind. Can I see the stereo 3-D movies?

A: Unfortunately, no. The anaglyph stereo 3-D technique relies on colors to separate the left and right eye images. If one can not see or distinguish between certain colors, then the anaglyph stereo 3-D effect will not work."

That's incorrect. The color of the image and the color of the lens is used to direct a false colored monochrome image to each eye. That is, the left eye receives a blue tinted monochrome image and the right eye receives a red tinted monochrome image (or vice-versa).

For someone who is color blind and can't differentiate red and blue, then they will perceive the color arriving at each eye to be the same. For them, the 3D effect will be even better.

Re:Color Blind

[imakemusic]

what i'm really hearing is that the next Hubble should be a binocular telescope.

I'm guessing here - but I'm sure someone could do some calculations to back me up... I don't think that would work. To get a decent stereo effect the two lenses would have to be some distance apart. I have two eyes but I can't tell the difference between the distance to the moon and the distance to the sun and that's quite some difference. In fact the whole sky could be one flat image as far as my eyes can tell.

The summary says that they've used a lot of artistic license. I am guessing this means they have exaggerated the difference between what each eye sees based on the known distance of the object. Either that or they've used one image from one point in Hubble's orbit and one image from the opposite point.

Small parallax problem?

[Gruturo]

Given that, outside the solar system, there's hardly anything closer than a couple parsecs except for some very faint objects, and 1 parsec is 1 parallax *second* (as in, 1/3600th of a degree), and it represents the angle formed by watching the same object from 2 observation points spaced 1AU (or 2AU?) apart, does this allow any actual 3d effect to be perceived by the brain? The left/right image separation should be insufficient (unless of course the content has been heavily software processed).

Also, please, don't release anaglyphs, there's a lot of different video hardware to enable 3d vision. Just release video with the left/right frames (side-by-side, above/below, alternating, you choose) and let each of us view it optimally on our hardware. There's plenty of software to accomplish that, even java applets and browser plugins.

Re:Small parallax problem?

[rwllama]

Yes, of course the camera separation is much wider than human eye separation. The camera motion is also probably faster than the speed of light. As you correctly infer, scientifically accurate visualizations of what the human eye would see moving at currently achievable speeds would look no different than the original Hubble image. What would be the point in releasing such a visualization?

Thank you for your comments on 3D formats. We did not feel that enough of the public has 3D hardware today, but a reasonable number might have anaglyph glasses. If we do future projects, we will increase the formats as appropriate.

If this were posted to photo.net...

[Lev13than]

Ouch - this is the best that Hubble can do? The images show serious chromatic aberrations, with significant red-blue fringing on edges. What's worse is that the effect gets more pronounced as the camera moves around. They should really consider ditching the point-and-shoot and movie up to an SLR with a decent carl-zeiss lens if they want to be taken seriously.

Re:Not annoying at all

[rwllama]

The visualization does uses separate left and right cameras. However, I forgot to mention in the posting that the "3D" is mostly "2.5D". We have no information about what the backside of the nebula looks like, so we could only do full 3D modeling if we artistically created volumes and pixels that Hubble does not observe. We did some of that for the "Hubble 3D" film, but did not invest such time on this project. We did sculpt the front side of the clouds in the nebula into landscapes, but the camera path stays mostly in front, so the sculpting is not that obvious. We are testing to see how much effort is required to get "enough" immersion.

Re:First new word I leaned today

[Chrisq]

I thought it was Analglyph at first

Would that be a tatoo on your arse designed to be viewed with 3d glasses?

It could open up some interesting lines: "Hey babe, if you like 3d movies I've got something to show you!" or "now your here would you like to come upstairs and take a look at my anaglyph?"

Re:Youtube it please

[nacturation]

FAKE.

This isn't true 3D, just like the special edition of Nightmare Before Christmas was not true 3D.

Unfortunately they didn't have the budget to place the cameras 500 light years apart to get a true stereoscopic image of the Large Megallanic Cloud.