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.

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.