Make a Stereoscopic VR object
Mouse over left, right or center to spin the robot.
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!
Wow! When did Danny get promoted to “world-famous Flash-master”?
Yeah, I think that should have read, “… so I enlisted
world-famous Flash-masterchump change Danny Mavromatis to write me a quick ActionScript to control the animation.”OH LODI!
ImageMagick will automatically convert a pair of images into one of these stereo images if you ask it nicely.
In the early nineties, a filmmaker produced a short demo reel in 3D Imax, where one of the (many) effects he used was to increase the intraocular spacing. If you take your shots with the lenses further apart than typical you’ll see a really odd thing happen. With the right context, you can screw with the viewer’s perception of scale in some really subtle and dramatic ways.
It is easily possible to make the viewer think a shot’s of the world’s most detailed HO-scale train set!