You coast until getting into the heliosphere of another star (they move quite predictably) - you can even slow down like that! (with the help of stellar aerobraking? That would be some sight...)
Sails (also of more active kind) probably have one monumental advantage: they should be fairly easily mass-produced (without swallowing half of GDP of the planet like TFA projects would / that's some solution to constant (it was pretty much always like that, don't kid yourself it will ever change much) lack of funds for research)
Though I suspect it might be just gradual spreading across Oort cloud (estimated trillion comets!) over several thousands of years... and at one point some groups will hitch a ride into the Oort cloud of some passing star. On geological timescales this will also assure very quick colonization of the galaxy.
We set up exclusion zones as is / from certain point in launch sequence, "oops" would be no worse than any random orbital debris (and most launches proceed over largely uninhabited areas anyway)
Generally, I somehow forgot the most important thing, what makes recent developments... slightly dubious, in context of matters at hand: how it is even possible, considering the Church always claims to be the most complete (or exclusive, at times) source of truth, to have things which at one point would land you in hell... and at other point, in heaven? (and vice versa!!)
(at least, regarding truth, Catholic Church earns a big plus with "truth cannot contradict truth" on the occasion of openly accepting evolution)
Worse, I'm starting to suspect the neglect of internationalization was expanded. That, or there's just some temporary weirdness, after upgrade, with timezones.
PS. And of course: how there seems to be a potential for even simpler estimation - also on the basis of "double effect" - if an arbitrary object is nearer or further than the one in focus on which eyes converge (perhaps requires only figuring out which of the "mirage edges" belongs to which eye; a binary decision from fairly simple geometric layout and, obviously, known & at least partly compared visual inputs). Or how the "double effect" getting smaller could easily help confirm proper direction, its disappearance part of final "locking on!" process (this last aspect would even possibly help here, with stereoscopy, if it could help us keep focus lock, basically)
I guess my point is - it's a fairly simple, predictable, robust, universal effect. Appears potentially useful in increasing "visual agility" - so I would be slightly disappointed if we didn't evolve some ability to utilize it (in natural environment!), considering at least a dozen million years of binocular vision in our ancestors.
Well, seriously, it might end good / too early to tell (with us being currently simply used to the old way of doing things)
But performance could be better / scrolling doesn't seem too fluid in current browsers... (on Atom-grade machine; so how could it be on smartphones / tablets / etc.?)
To be clear: I mostly meant wondering how people miss the lack of this effect; because IMHO normally it's quite often noticeable - but also just a perfectly normal way of how we see (plus: largely a rhetorical question / I'm aware how poor grip on ourselves we have, how many things which we take for granted are myths - monolithic "me" (while split-brain patients seem almost normal) with largely unbroken consciousness (while we merely like to pretend how our memory is decent; choose to ignore how we are generally closer to our peers than to ourselves at distant life stages) being the prime suspect... Or, very related: there is a type of very localized brain trauma, after which people don't realize they've become blind)
Constantly there... so in the case of doubled objects possibly quite ingrained in the way our visual system works (or how it sets itself up, more specifically), considering it's an unavoidable geometric effect(*). So quite a bit of weirdness possible while using stereoscopy...
(*) I suspect it might be actually a large part of binocular vision processes, how we infer depth - perhaps of some initial rough mechanism which helps to set focus and convergence in the first place (after all, if our depth perception would totally depend on those two - how could we quickly set them properly on a depth appropriate for some random object?). Think about what this effect does: an absolutely constant doubling, plus with very straightforward relationship (if eyes are set at, say, background - which is pretty much their default setting) between the distance of object to us and the apparent separation of its "doubles". That could deduce basic spatial relationships of nearby objects basically instantly (and uncannily analogous to how DSLRs do it...). How stereoscopy ignores it could be quite counterproductive... (of course no way to really replicate it, via stereoscopy, even if we wanted to)
Exploration of visual-neuro-cognitive-etc. might be fun / too bad it's too late for me now (though hopefully one day I'll care enough to explore how awfully lost the above suspicions are vs. our state of knowledge;p )
I wasn't really talking about comfort in the case of pictures, either - being static images, they are inherently quite comfortable. Just noting how ignored, in the end, they are; maybe just uninteresting. OTOH - photos people care about don't appear to need stereoscopic versions...
Why the availability of technical means for movies didn't really help half a century ago? (and looking at current uptake, you can probably count things worth looking on the fingers of one hand -and they would be equally worthwhile without stereoscopy!)
2D cinema already separated those from visual perspective, something that never happens in nature
Of course it does happen, for very distant sceneries (think mountain range a few dozen km from you, for example); they are for all intents and purposes a flat background - as far as focus, convergence, parallax are concerned. But we see their spatial structure, visual perspective works.
Watching "2D" cinema like that is effortless (especially since physically the eyes can settle in quite usual, relaxed mode)
Avatar could be as well a huge success because of who made it... I don't know, did the guy had some well-received movies earlier?
Agreed, and I suspect it's more than boring, also "wrong" (not in an interesting way of some unusual photographs; more like uncanny) - there's another very natural, to our eyes, element of all this nice blurriness of things outside focus depth: parallax "doubling" those things, making two translucent objects out of one.
In photography that's basically nonexistent (though heavy blurs might be suspected of influencing us similarly); in stereoscopy it works in a new, incorrect way.
Yes, few peculiar niches... how large portion in libraries of photographic materials do they form?
(plus there's a reason why I asked about making photos; also, I could easily see all kinds of non-augmented stereoscopic images I ever got my hands on... but that's no reason to particularly value a typical utilization of the method)
I really wonder why and how people can miss the lack of real parallax and its effects... and even more than lack of it, actually: in "2D" images the parallax is simply nonexistent - but in stereoscopy it's wrong.
Are we so used to seeing doubled translucent objects in front and behind of our momentary focus depth, recombining / etc. when we change focus, that we don't realize consciously their absence - only at most "oh this looks unusual"?
(and actually, it was (well, a Yugoslavian copy of it to be exact...) among the last means to combat boredom at one place of family reunions; not that great even / deep focus gives even weirder results in stereoscopy than movie-like shallow one, IMHO)
Deep focus while filming won't change how your eyes must maintain "focus lock" on the screen while spatial and convergence hints scream "refocus!" (and they are there, that's the whole point of "3D" - objects apparently in front or behind screen)
As a side note, many scenes in those stereoscopic toys (disk with ~dozen photos) that I've seen had very deep focus... IMHO it makes the whole scene, paradoxically, very flat. Yes, there is "depth" of course - but feels non-gradual, like several backgrounds in old SNES platformers.
...in stereoscopy (NOT "3D!): one aspect of parallax is quite wrong - the "doubling" of objects in front of focus plane, of background behind it, etc. Strangely, people hardly realize it's there...maybe because it's so unavoidable.
They also forget how "3D" had its golden area already, half a century ago (with polarizing filters!)
Or how the stereoscopic sister of photography is barely younger than its "2D" sibling, at ~160 years. Quite easily done and inexpensive for a long time.
Now ask yourself this: did you make even one such photo? Know anybody who did?
Slashdot Mirror
A Buzzard Ramjet (if they can build it)
(...and if it can create more thrust than drag, which might very well be not the case)
...seems like a good place for basement-dwelling kind slasher movie.
You coast until getting into the heliosphere of another star (they move quite predictably) - you can even slow down like that! (with the help of stellar aerobraking? That would be some sight...)
Sails (also of more active kind) probably have one monumental advantage: they should be fairly easily mass-produced (without swallowing half of GDP of the planet like TFA projects would / that's some solution to constant (it was pretty much always like that, don't kid yourself it will ever change much) lack of funds for research)
It looks like 99% of the room is used for tanks and engines.
Rocket equation and physics in general is a bitch, isn't it? (that 99% is not much worse than with all our current launch vehicles)
Would an automated container ship no longer be a ship? (there's hardly any crew on them as it now...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryo_space_colonization
... and at one point some groups will hitch a ride into the Oort cloud of some passing star. On geological timescales this will also assure very quick colonization of the galaxy.
...if we'll ever do direct flights, that seems like the most likely way (yes, we can already put humans into deep hibernation!)
Though I suspect it might be just gradual spreading across Oort cloud (estimated trillion comets!) over several thousands of years
We set up exclusion zones as is / from certain point in launch sequence, "oops" would be no worse than any random orbital debris (and most launches proceed over largely uninhabited areas anyway)
Generally, I somehow forgot the most important thing, what makes recent developments... slightly dubious, in context of matters at hand: how it is even possible, considering the Church always claims to be the most complete (or exclusive, at times) source of truth, to have things which at one point would land you in hell ... and at other point, in heaven? (and vice versa!!)
(at least, regarding truth, Catholic Church earns a big plus with "truth cannot contradict truth" on the occasion of openly accepting evolution)
Worse, I'm starting to suspect the neglect of internationalization was expanded. That, or there's just some temporary weirdness, after upgrade, with timezones.
PS. And of course: how there seems to be a potential for even simpler estimation - also on the basis of "double effect" - if an arbitrary object is nearer or further than the one in focus on which eyes converge (perhaps requires only figuring out which of the "mirage edges" belongs to which eye; a binary decision from fairly simple geometric layout and, obviously, known & at least partly compared visual inputs). Or how the "double effect" getting smaller could easily help confirm proper direction, its disappearance part of final "locking on!" process (this last aspect would even possibly help here, with stereoscopy, if it could help us keep focus lock, basically)
I guess my point is - it's a fairly simple, predictable, robust, universal effect. Appears potentially useful in increasing "visual agility" - so I would be slightly disappointed if we didn't evolve some ability to utilize it (in natural environment!), considering at least a dozen million years of binocular vision in our ancestors.
"Everyone else" seems largely ignoring stereography, in the end. Again, and again.
Well, seriously, it might end good / too early to tell (with us being currently simply used to the old way of doing things)
But performance could be better / scrolling doesn't seem too fluid in current browsers... (on Atom-grade machine; so how could it be on smartphones / tablets / etc.?)
To be clear: I mostly meant wondering how people miss the lack of this effect; because IMHO normally it's quite often noticeable - but also just a perfectly normal way of how we see (plus: largely a rhetorical question / I'm aware how poor grip on ourselves we have, how many things which we take for granted are myths - monolithic "me" (while split-brain patients seem almost normal) with largely unbroken consciousness (while we merely like to pretend how our memory is decent; choose to ignore how we are generally closer to our peers than to ourselves at distant life stages) being the prime suspect... Or, very related: there is a type of very localized brain trauma, after which people don't realize they've become blind)
Constantly there... so in the case of doubled objects possibly quite ingrained in the way our visual system works (or how it sets itself up, more specifically), considering it's an unavoidable geometric effect(*). So quite a bit of weirdness possible while using stereoscopy...
(*) I suspect it might be actually a large part of binocular vision processes, how we infer depth - perhaps of some initial rough mechanism which helps to set focus and convergence in the first place (after all, if our depth perception would totally depend on those two - how could we quickly set them properly on a depth appropriate for some random object?). Think about what this effect does: an absolutely constant doubling, plus with very straightforward relationship (if eyes are set at, say, background - which is pretty much their default setting) between the distance of object to us and the apparent separation of its "doubles". That could deduce basic spatial relationships of nearby objects basically instantly (and uncannily analogous to how DSLRs do it...). How stereoscopy ignores it could be quite counterproductive... (of course no way to really replicate it, via stereoscopy, even if we wanted to)
Exploration of visual-neuro-cognitive-etc. might be fun / too bad it's too late for me now (though hopefully one day I'll care enough to explore how awfully lost the above suspicions are vs. our state of knowledge ;p )
I wasn't really talking about comfort in the case of pictures, either - being static images, they are inherently quite comfortable. Just noting how ignored, in the end, they are; maybe just uninteresting. OTOH - photos people care about don't appear to need stereoscopic versions...
Why the availability of technical means for movies didn't really help half a century ago? (and looking at current uptake, you can probably count things worth looking on the fingers of one hand -and they would be equally worthwhile without stereoscopy!)
2D cinema already separated those from visual perspective, something that never happens in nature
Of course it does happen, for very distant sceneries (think mountain range a few dozen km from you, for example); they are for all intents and purposes a flat background - as far as focus, convergence, parallax are concerned. But we see their spatial structure, visual perspective works.
Watching "2D" cinema like that is effortless (especially since physically the eyes can settle in quite usual, relaxed mode)
Avatar could be as well a huge success because of who made it ... I don't know, did the guy had some well-received movies earlier?
Agreed, and I suspect it's more than boring, also "wrong" (not in an interesting way of some unusual photographs; more like uncanny) - there's another very natural, to our eyes, element of all this nice blurriness of things outside focus depth: parallax "doubling" those things, making two translucent objects out of one.
In photography that's basically nonexistent (though heavy blurs might be suspected of influencing us similarly); in stereoscopy it works in a new, incorrect way.
And why do you think I asked specifically about the popularity of making such photos?
Yes, few peculiar niches... how large portion in libraries of photographic materials do they form?
(plus there's a reason why I asked about making photos; also, I could easily see all kinds of non-augmented stereoscopic images I ever got my hands on ... but that's no reason to particularly value a typical utilization of the method)
I really wonder why and how people can miss the lack of real parallax and its effects ... and even more than lack of it, actually: in "2D" images the parallax is simply nonexistent - but in stereoscopy it's wrong.
Are we so used to seeing doubled translucent objects in front and behind of our momentary focus depth, recombining / etc. when we change focus, that we don't realize consciously their absence - only at most "oh this looks unusual"?
As a kid you convinced yourself it makes photos?
(and actually, it was (well, a Yugoslavian copy of it to be exact...) among the last means to combat boredom at one place of family reunions; not that great even / deep focus gives even weirder results in stereoscopy than movie-like shallow one, IMHO)
Deep focus while filming won't change how your eyes must maintain "focus lock" on the screen while spatial and convergence hints scream "refocus!" (and they are there, that's the whole point of "3D" - objects apparently in front or behind screen)
As a side note, many scenes in those stereoscopic toys (disk with ~dozen photos) that I've seen had very deep focus ... IMHO it makes the whole scene, paradoxically, very flat. Yes, there is "depth" of course - but feels non-gradual, like several backgrounds in old SNES platformers.
Congratulations. Now you can notice how very rare they are / how their compositions are not of average kind.
How the mechanisms controlling them, in tandem, might very well be linked isn't the same as claiming that one controls the other...
...in stereoscopy (NOT "3D!): one aspect of parallax is quite wrong - the "doubling" of objects in front of focus plane, of background behind it, etc. Strangely, people hardly realize it's there...maybe because it's so unavoidable.
They also forget how "3D" had its golden area already, half a century ago (with polarizing filters!)
Or how the stereoscopic sister of photography is barely younger than its "2D" sibling, at ~160 years. Quite easily done and inexpensive for a long time.
Now ask yourself this: did you make even one such photo? Know anybody who did?
Still here? ;) ("wit"?...hm, that did end up rather curiously)