
3D pictures without glasses - bradgessler
http://tasteoftomorrow.com/2010/06/14/amazing-3d-pictures-without-glasses/
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petercooper
Also known as.. an animation! A 2D movie is not a "3D picture" merely by
alternating two frames of it. You can get a sense of depth from any 2D
sequence where the camera is moving. A more realistic approach is when you
have two such frames side by side and you focus an eye on each.

~~~
raimondious
That's true, but this is a way to perceive depth for people who can't view
stereoimages (e.g., people blind in one eye). You do experience some amount of
depth even though each eye is receiving the same information.

From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscopy#Wiggle_stereoscopy>:

 _Wiggling works for the same reason that a translational pan (or tracking
shot) in a movie provides good depth information: the visual cortex is able to
infer distance information from motion parallax, the relative speed of the
perceived motion of different objects on the screen. Many small animals bob
their heads to create motion parallax (wiggling) so they can better estimate
distance prior to jumping._

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petercooper
True, but with a strong emphasis on the word "some." If you wiggle a 1D line,
you experience "some" sort of 2D. If you flicker a 3D scene back and forth a
second, you experience "some" sort of time. But these things are woefully poor
mirages that only seem impressive for a limited time.

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JeffJenkins
There are a bunch of comments about what effect stereoscopic vision actually
has on depth perception, so let me explain:

Depth perception from stereoscopic vision primarily matters for things which
are very close to you. I have amblyopia (1) and no particular problems in most
of my day to day activities. The main place that I lose out is in sports,
where there are frequently small fast moving objects moving towards you and a
small amount of time getting to them. If I'm moving to pick up a glass of
water things are going slow enough, and I have enough other feedback
mechanisms, that I can determine the distance by the time my hand reaches the
glass.

My favourite story about depth perception was when I was playing ping pong
with a friend of mine in university. I'm not a great player, but we were going
back and forth okay. Then on one of the returns he very slightly changed the
speed that the ball was coming at me. I completely failed to hit it, and it
became clear that I had been using timing as a mechanism to help me compensate
for not knowing where in space the ball was.

It's unclear whether it's because of choosing activities based on what my
condition lets me be good at, but I don't find the lack of 3D vision to be my
biggest issue. My biggest issue is that when doing things I need to rotate my
head to focus on things that are on my left. This is a really big deal when
I'm biking, because I am frequently out in traffic. Since it still functions
as peripheral vision I am aware of what's going on on my left side, but I have
to turn my head way over to get more detail. This is unsafe since when I turn
my head I'm more blinded on the right side than I was on the left when I was
facing straight.

(1) Amblyopia causes the image from one eye to be suppressed. In my case it
means that I'm primarily looking out of my right eye, and my left eye
functions almost solely as peripheral vision. I can also force myself to
switch which eye I'm looking out of, but I default back to the right eye if
I'm not focussing.

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Quiark
The page says that the brain should integrate both pictures and show a 3D
view. I don't think the 'integrate' part works for me, the rapidly changing
pictures are quite annoying and I'm unable to stare at it for a longer time.
What's your experience?

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Groxx
The moderately-fast, subtle ones are probably the most effective. Some are
pretty bad (the Jurassic Park one in particular, the change is too drastic).

Try just _looking_ , not staring. Relax and move through them at a decent
pace. You may be trying too hard, preventing the illusion from working
(similar to how thinking / staring too hard with some optical illusions
diminishes the effect).

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CognitiveLens
Also, the two separate images probably won't integrate into a single 3D
percept (it will still look like alternating viewpoints), but your spatial
perception will be stimulated enough to give you a fixed, coherent sense of
depth, i.e. even though the image is clearly changing, your depth perception
of the scene remains constant.

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phalien
For more photos like these check <http://start3d.com>

They can also generate 3D "images" (they call them piku-piku) from two images.
You can find more details and instructions on their website.

Cristi

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Groxx
That's a pretty effective algorithm for blending the two... And I love how
there are different ways to show the image, exactly what I was hoping to find.

Nice site :D Shall get plenty of browsing from me for at least a while.

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ghotli
I have seen this kind of thing before, but the specific images on this post
were well worth seeing. You get such a more intimate sense of the environment,
especially in the third and fourth images.

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moron4hire
A little while ago, I did an animation in HTML5 that uses various 3D hinting
techniques to create an illusion of depth
<http://seanmcbeth.110mb.com/stereo.html>

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JeffJenkins
That's neat looking, though it isn't doing anything for me. What are the
things you tried to do? Can someone else with stereoscopic vision tell me if
it's doing anything for them?

I'm really interested in 3D techniques which work for people without the brain
mechanisms to fuse the images of their eyes (unsurprisingly).

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moron4hire
Well, from this Wikipedia article: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscopy>

The techniques I'm using are:

== Stereopsis: in this case, simple linear transformation in X-axis
proportional to Z-axis as an approximation to a real 3D transformation

== Occlusion of one object by another: basic Z sorting, i.e. "painters
algorithm"

== Subtended visual angle of an object of known size: I scale the object size
proportional to its distance in the Z-axis

== Haze, desaturation, and a shift to bluishness: I interpolate the object
color proportional to its distance in the Z-axis

If you can get the effect to work well, it goes from being a fairly
incomprehensible jumble of grey circles (too information-dense for 2D display)
to a box of bouncing balls where you can easily track individual objects as
they move around.

EDIT: looking at the code, it seems I forgot about a technique that I used! I
also threw in the "Vertical position" bullet point from the Wikipedia article,
but without a frame of reference in the rendered scene you wouldn't be able to
tell.

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baddox
"The most significant factor which contributes to depth perception is
bionocular disparity"

There's no way this is true. How impaired are people with only one functional
eye? Not very--their diminished peripheral vision is much more impairing than
their lack of binocular disparity. I don't have any evidence to back it up,
but I believe that motion parallax is the single most important source of
depth information. Notice that one-eyed people and non-3D films don't suffer
from any lack of motion parallax.

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sliverstorm
Listen carefully to your argument.

You say that peripheral vision is more impairing than lack of binocular
disparity. But peripheral vision has zero impact on depth perception, so the
existence of the peripheral vision problem does not mean that binocular
disparity can't be the biggest impact _to depth perception_ , which was your
initial assertion.

Also, motion parallax is useless for stationary objects seen by a stationary
observer. You make it sound like lacking one eye is no trouble at all, I don't
buy it.

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axod
Lacking one eye really doesn't matter that much. You move your head a bit, you
instantly know where everything is in 3D.

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viraptor
Simple trick: Take a pen with a cap. Close one eye. Hold it at some distance -
as if you were holding it just above the desk while sitting at it. Without
making the hands touch (just hold the end of the cap and the end of the pen),
try to put them together again. It's actually not that easy and I miss almost
every time. Moving your head a bit doesn't help that much in this situation.

So yeah - for big objects, scenery, etc. it works. For some manual actions 2
points of vision are much more useful than paralax when moving.

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jerf
I have dubious depth perception; two modestly nearsighted eyes. I just took
your challenge. I did it perfectly, first time. That's probably because my
brain's depth perception mechanisms are used to adding in more cues than
brains that can lean on perfect binocular vision do.

People tend to get really romantic about how brains work, so I should probably
make something clear. When I say that my brain is more used to integrating
multiple other environmental clues to get depth perception than brains with
perfect stereoscopic vision, that's actually a _bad_ thing. The resulting
depth perception is clearly worse than good stereoscopic vision. I am lucky in
that if I wear glasses, which I do not routinely, I can get true stereoscopic
vision back; I do not lack the brain mechanisms entirely as some people with
bad vision do. And that's clearly better. My brain is better adapted to
degraded input, but it remains degraded input. Brains prefer stereoscopic
vision when available because they naturally gravitate to the best sources of
data.

Rolling back around to my main point, depth perception is a _great_ deal more
complicated than most people give it credit for. There's really two distinct
depth perceptions, one using stereoscopic vision that only works out to a few
tens of feet regardless of how good your vision, and one that works on the
rest of the world using motion and occlusion cues and a variety of other
things. These flashing pictures manage to fire some of my depth perception
based on motion cues, but completely lack the precise depth perception I get
from stereoscopic vision. There's really no such thing as a monolithic "depth
perception", it's a lot of things that get integrated in the brain.

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white_eskimo
Was just talking to a young lady the other day about a product she built and
is selling on Etsy that leverages this concept and applies it towards the
iphone. Check out [http://www.etsy.com/listing/49225650/foresight-a-
smartphone-...](http://www.etsy.com/listing/49225650/foresight-a-smartphone-
virtual-reality)

*Disclosure: I don't own one, but it sounds like a neat idea. Especially with the new iphone's gyro sensor

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ggchappell
Lots of comments here assume you have to have _two_ images. (And how to we
reduce the flickering, etc.)

Nope. Nothing to do with stereo here; it is all about simulating a moving
viewpoint within a 3-D scene. Three cues help the brain figure out 3-D:
stereovision, focusing, and the effect of movement on a scene.

This is doing the last one above. Now, the simplest thing to do is move
rapidly back & forth between 2 viewpoints, but there are other things one
could do. For example, move the viewpoint _smoothly_ from one point to another
and then back. Or you could move the view point smoothly in a small circle.
Etc. Want to reduce flicker? Then do one of those. Of course, they require
more than 2 frames.

BTW, my favorite example of the "movement helps with 3-D" effect is the map
room scene in Star Trek Generations. (Probably on YouTube, but I can't find
it.) If you watch it, notice how the scene being viewed continually moves
around, even when it doesn't really need to.

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rradu
Not really a feasible 3D option it seems. I'm not gonna watch my TV if the
image vibrates so violently.

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cgrand-net
I wonder how the vibration would feel at a high frequency. Would we perceive
blurry "flat" image or depth-of-field-blurry 3D image?

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ars
Blurry flat. The author has no idea what he's talking about.

The brain isn't integrating anything, all that happening is by moving you are
telling the brain this part of the picture goes in front of this one.

A totally ordinary movie will do EXACTLY the same thing.

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JeffL
Does anyone else think that this also seems to work with one eye closed?

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JacobAldridge
Sure, because it's providing both images, not relying on our eyes to receive
different images. That's why it flickers and moves back and forth.

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joonap
This is really old stuff. I hope the article is being sarcastic.

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typedef_void
This looks pretty cool.

However, if it's actually useful, why wasn't it invented layer as part of
OpenGL / taught in standard graphics courses?

Given that OpenGL already has the 3D model, and has to redraw everything 30 or
60fps anyway, there's no performance hit to slightly change the camera angle.

What are the limitations / side effects of this technique that cause it to not
be used in practice?

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vidarh
The side effect is that people made to endure this more than a couple of
minutes as a novelty will want to murder you. They'll then plead temporary
insanity and likely get off with a light scolding and a medal.

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kaddar
I feel that it would be useful if browsers supported 3d image formats by
displaying them in this manner to most monitors, and supported monitors would
allow better 3d images:

[http://linearlyindependent.com/post/472949731/a-call-for-
a-b...](http://linearlyindependent.com/post/472949731/a-call-for-a-browser-
supported-3d-image-formats)

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MarkBook
I swear I thought of this yesterday driving to work as a way for one eyed
people to get depth perception. I'm a genius! (I have a long commute)

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robryan
Can this be done faster to remove any real flicker or will our eyes end up
just perceiving one image then?

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jim_dot
It wouldn't work properly since both eyes would be receiving both views. You'd
end up getting a shimmer type thing going on even if you couldn't figure out
exactly what was going on.

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bdr
I have a site with a bunch of stereoview images. I wonder if there's a way to
automatically convert them.

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ANH
Just a warning: the hat-tip link at the end of the blog entry is NSFW.

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usaar333
Did anyone else get a headache after staring at the images?

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ddemchuk
After having read about the Nintendo 3DS all day, I've been dying to see this
3D effect in action. This is really awesome.

Now the question is, is there an easy way to do this with our own content? I
would love to mess around with this technology.

EDIT: These images came from here: <http://abduzeedo.com/stereoscopic-images-
inspiration>

I now know that these are stereoscopic image examples. My question still
stands though, what would be the easiest way to go about reproducing this
effect? It seems like mounting two flip minos could be really cool if this
would work.

Anyone know of any really smooth examples of this technology?

~~~
jim_dot
I work as a software developer for a company that develops autostereoscopic
displays (For seeing 3D without glasses - like the Nintendo 3DS will do) and
stereoscopic software. We are currently developing a line of products for iOS
devices to watch videos in 3D and see images and read comics (eventually) in
3D. So at some point this year when it all gets launched hopefully you can
pick one up for like $15 for your iPod/iPhone/even iPad (although I don't know
that the iPad version will end up being $15).

Edit: I should add that it appears the Nintendo 3DS is using a parallax
barrier (but I don't know how true that is - I've heard it could be using a
different system too, haven't seen one though). Our technology is using
lenticular mainly, so the images will be quite different from both.
Lenticular, for example, preserves the brightness of the image much better
than parallax barrier.

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glhaynes
_We are currently developing a line of products for iOS devices to watch
videos in 3D and see images and read comics (eventually) in 3D._

Using wiggle stereoscopy?

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moron4hire
Nobody uses wiggle "stereoscopy" for anything but novelty pictures. It's just
not a practical technique.

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glhaynes
"see images and read comics (eventually) in 3D"

Sounds like it could be called a "novelty" app to me, and one I'd really like
to see happen. Regardless, what other methods are available for getting "3D"
out of iOS devices? "Cross-eyed" 3D seems even more of a "novelty" to me.

EDIT: Perhaps "a line of products" means hardware in addition to software. I
read it initially as meaning a line of apps.

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axod
Is this an April fools? These are not "3D" pictures. There's nothing 'amazing'
here IMHO.

