They made the interesting point that many (most?) computer games are already fully 3D internally and have to add logic to provide a point of view, then project this point of view on a (typically) 2D computer screen. The games have to subtract out the third dimension in order to support the display technology that’s available.

As a result it was possible to achieve 3D viewing on many such games even when such capability was entirely unofficial and unsupported by the vendor!

I didn’t really get how they reverse-engineered the games to do this, though.

Talk about one-eyed cosmologists! Hubble spends much of its time looking at things other than very distant galaxies. And the Hubble Law is hardly the appropriate way to figure out the distances in these cases.

http://blog.richmond.edu/physicsbunn/2010/01/20/how-3d-movies-really-work/

We can definitely do 3D iMax astronomy. We just need to the eyes of giants. We could use the parallax from images six months apart, though a 3 1/4 light year distance yields only a second of an arc difference. More interesting would be to synthesize our own giants using data from Hipparchos or red and blue shifts to provide a 3D sense of nearby stars and other objects.

When 3D fails, iMax can always exploit visual dominance. Look at the opening to the original Star Wars. That was almost 3D in its own right. Clever composition can give a great sense of distance, proportion and distance. Combine that with some actual 3D iMax footage of a shuttle repair mission, and I’ll bet we’ll have a hit on our hands.

I’d like to see Hubble pictures in imax. They could use some lasers and stuff though.

nowadays it’s pretty straightforward to emulate the procedure the brain uses and figure out which things are in front of what other things in a 2d image, and bring Hubble images of the Orion Nebula to 3d life in a spectacular way (it really was amazing). Indeed 3d tv’s on the very near horizon will be able to do this in real time to 2d pictures.

saying your brain simply differences the two eyes’ images to determine depth is totally oversimplified, to the point of being wrong, as dk’s simple experiment shows. clearly the article was written by a theorist!

That said, I don’t think there’s any single object that shows any appreciable depth in parallax; while it would let you see the differences in distance between (nearby) stars, it’s not going to let you see any depth in something like the Orion nebula. And in fact, I’m not sure that there are two stars that show appreciable parallax in the same Hubble field-of-view.

True, but 3-D films use only the binocular clue. You can’t choose which depth to focus on, you can’t move your head to look around something etc.

There was some discussion at Ted Bunn’s blog on 3-D technologies. Here is something from a reply by me there:

n the latest Physik Journal (magazine of the German Physical Society), there was a two-page article on 3-D techniques. You mentioned three: colour, linear polarisation and the quarter-wave-plate model (your hypothesis was correct; that’s how it works). The last is definitely the best of these three, but shares this problem with linear polarisation: the reflected image has to be polarised, so the screen has to be mirror-like, not just a white screen.

There are two other techniques. One projects frames at twice the normal rate, altenately for each eye, and the glasses contain infrared-controlled LCD shutters which alternate at the appropriate rate. Probably the best system, but the glasses are more expensive.

Another one is quite interesting: for one eye, use three primary colours, and for the other eye, use three OTHER primary colours. The filter for each eye only lets through the primary colours intended for that eye. (For a given perceived colour, there are many ways of mixing it out of narrow-band “primary” colours”.

See also more discussion in another thread there:

http://blog.richmond.edu/physicsbunn/2010/01/20/how-3d-movies-really-work/