This rig is something of a museum or art installation, but the concept is so simple we thought it could easily inspire your next project. The two mirrors and two video sources make up a stereoscopic display.
The user sits between two displays (computer monitors shown here, but the post also shows images projected on two walls of a room). A pair of mirrors mounted at forty-five degrees form the eye pieces. It’s a V-shaped mirror assembly in which the narrow end pointing toward the bridge of the user’s nose. The mirrors reflect the images from the monitors, giving a different view for each eye.
In this case each monitor is playing back a video loop, but one is just slightly longer than the other. Each monitor has a potentiometer in front of it. The user can turn them to speed or slow the playback in an attempt to bring the video back into sync. We don’t think we’d replicate that portion of the project. But it might be fun to view some stereoscopic clips in this way. There’s even instructions on how two cameras were used to record the scenes.
You can get a closer view of the test apparatus in the clip after the jump.
There’s a trick you can do with sunglasses. Load up a youtube video shot out of a car window etc. where the scenery is moving sideways. Then put the sunglasses on front of one eye only.
The lowered light input to the eye makes it react more slowly to the picture, which combines with the parallax effect in the picture to give both eyes a view from a slightly different angle and the scenery should pop out in 3D.
Pulfrich effect, relies in the fact that the eye recieving a dim image is slightly lagged in response resulting in the brain reconstructing the motion parallax
Works with football or other sports where the camera pans with the player. Squinting with one eye works too.
I’ve seen a similar rig at an SPIE conference a few years back, this is the original Wheatstone(yeah the same guy who came up with the bridge) configuration of the stereo viewer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Wheatstone#Optics
It’s a simple and effective means of 3d fusion and a lot more feasable with cheap lcd displays
You could probably recreate this with a couple of smartphones and some programming.
+1 You could probably recreate this with some hardware and some software comment :P
You could probably recreate this comment using some kind of device that turns an electrical current on and off very fast based on the signals from a flat plastic box with lots of little push switches on it.
The picture reminded me of that cartoon villain who used bees to attack his targets…
he kept saying “swarm”, “Swarm!” It might’ve been on Space Ghost.
Really inspirational, thanks for sharing! I just cannot wait to give it a try, I think I want to figure out to visualize my generative architectural spaces this way. It would be terrific!