Do it Yourself  3D movies & pictures.

The picture of Buzz linked to the home page was made in what is probably the simplest way for a still scene.  I simply composed a scene with some depth to it, set the computer's little ccd camera (a Q-Cam in this case) about a foot away and took a picture.  The camera was then moved to the right about 2 or 3 inches and another picture was taken.  Doing this with the computer has at least two advantages.  First you can see what you're taking a picture of before pressing the button and if you don't like what you do get it's easy to take another.  Second you can easily size the photos and align them for good stereo viewing in any of a number of photoediting software packages. (Photodeluxe 2 was used in this case)  If you have trouble viewing the image you may need to resize it to about 4inches wide on your computer's screen as you view it at about 24inches distance while relaxing your eyes to get the images to cross and fuse.  If this never has worked too well for you then you may want to get a pair of simple prismatic lenses to hold much like opera glasses. They really make viewing easier, at least for most folks. They can be purchased from a variety of sources like www.stereoscopy.com/reel3d/ etc.  Click on the links below for some similar pictures of things around campus as they become available. (more to come)

Some of these next pictures were taken with a regular videocamera using a mirror apparatus much like that first used by Wheatsone in the mid nineteenth century for viewing hand drawn stereopairs. The picture quality is not that great as they are after all just frames obtained with a video capture card.  Others are taken with a similar but smaller mirror setup using the Q-Cam mentioned above.  This method has the advantage of not needing the scene to be still between pictures nor needing two separate camera lenses to accomplish this.  It has the disadvantage of having a field of view only about half as wide as usual for the same vertical field.  Pictures may of course be resized and even separated if necessary for ease of viewing with photoediting software. The high speed 3-d photos were gotten using the methods mentioned on the high speed photos page.  A LatheBalloon Pop, Rubber Sheet

Using the video camera got me to thinking "Why not try for a 3-d movie?".  The result is the following; no I didn't intend to hit the camera with the hula-hoop.  You view this movie the same way you do the other stereopairs here.  avi format,  2.5Mb or mpg format , 468Kb. After you get the image looking 3D just click on it to see it in motion.
return to home.