When plain photography isn’t enough, sometimes I will resort to shooting stereo images, as was the case with my Douglas C. Newell Paperboy trophy. If you feel like really out-nerding yourself, you can apply the same camera-shifting stereo shooting technique to your VR object photography.

I made this simple turntable from some available particle board and a cheap lazy-susan bearing. I cut index marks into the side of one disk at 5 degree intervals, making every third cut a little wider so that I could easily identify the 15 degreee marks. 15 degrees of rotation between shots will yield a 24 frame sequence.

To create an anaglyphic VR object movie, shoot one one full rotation from your first camera position, then shift your camera 70mm and shoot another rotation.

Convert the resulting stereo image pairs into a series of anaglyphs. Making your own stereo anaglyphs (red/blue glasses images) is very simple:

1. Obtain your stereo pair (RGB)
2. Open both images in Photoshop
3. Copy the entire red channel from the left image
4. Paste that into the red channel of the right image
5. Repeat for each frame in the sequence.

Your anaglyph sequence can then be made into a VR object movie using Quicktime or some other method. I have always kind of wanted to try doing one in Flash, so I enlisted world-famous Flash-master Danny Mavromatis to write me a quick ActionScript to control the animation. Next I’d like to try a version for cross-eyed viewing.

Need Glasses? Order a sample-Pak from American Paper Optics

, or print your own frames from this pdf and make lenses from lighting gels.

Dork-on!

This entry was posted on Friday, July 22nd, 2005 at 10:16 pm and is filed under Photo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.