More 3D Picspam

[ffutures]

Went out with the Aiptek 3D camera again, this time set to 3 megapixels, which I think must be the true resolution for the sensor - the larger ones look interpolated. A bright but very chilly day - there was some ice on the Round Pond. Most of the pictures were tests of perspective etc. and not especially exciting, but I got some nice pictures of swans and the Albert Memorial. On the whole I think it works pretty well, though a couple of times I found it difficult to see the screen - mostly when I was looking at something fairly bright, the screen just looked too dark by comparison because of the 3D effect. Not a huge problem, I could see enough to take a picture. As before these have been reduced to 800 pixels in the largest dimension by Photobucket, I've put one of the swan pictures below at full size.

































I'm happier with these than with the first set, and since 3 megapixels is adequate for my needs I'll probably stick with this camera rather than going for something better and more expensive.

I've used red/cyan for these, which I think is the type of 3D glasses people are most likely to have. I haven't experimented with reducing ghosting etc., which will be my next step.

Comments

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

That's a very splendid swan.

I'm not sure I still have a pair of glasses, so I cannot comment on the 3D nature.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It was doing that repeatedly, I think it might have been preening or something.

If you can't find glasses, try sitting a bit back from the pairs of images and cross your eyes until the images overlap and fuse. But don't worry if you can't make it work, a lot of people can't.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

You will hurt people's eyes if you don't pre-process shots before making pairs. You can see that your lenses have a significant vertical displacement which means that it hurts the brain to fuse the pairs. People vary in how tolerant they are of this, though. The good news is that you can correct this easily with a free piece of software -- Stereo Photo Maker -- but you will have to run it in an emulator to run it on Macs (any emulator will do, it's not demanding). You will be amazed by how much better your photos look after you align them correctly -- and of course, once you've done it once you can apply the exact same alignment adjustment to every photo taken with the same camera and although it won't be perfect it will be very very quick and good enough for all but the very best shots.

How far apart are the lenses on the camera? I'm not seeing a lot of 3d effect. If they're close together (say an inch, which is not uncommon in cheap 3d cameras) then you'll be wanting to use them for things at about 4-8 feet away. Experiment.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The lenses are about 4 cm apart, measured centre to centre. I was wondering about the vertical separation, it seemed a little odd to me too, I thought there must be something I was missing. I'll give it another shot with correction for that and ghosting eliminated. Thanks!

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

OK, so eye separation is typically 63mm ish -- so this are going to work best from as close as they will focus (probably about 1m?) to about 10-12 feet away. And bright, clear conditions of course.

Ghosting doesn't bother me because I personally don't like anaglyphs much anyway so normally view pairs.