Stereographer
engineersneedart.com
engineersneedart.com
I was looking at my old 3DS photos just recently, and there's not much software to read MPO files, so this project looks pretty darn cool and I'll be checking it out.
Something that I'm sure some people aren't aware of is that the 3DS's 640x480 photos don't match the resolution or aspect ratio of the 15:9 400x240 (800x240, but halved horizontally for 3D) screen, so the 3DS photo gallery actually shows photos zoomed in by default. If you didn't know this, now you can revisit your 3DS photos and see extra photo for free by pulling down on the circle pad.
Edit: I should mention - I did say that there's not much software that reads MPO files, but one program that does is StereoPhoto Maker. https://stereo.jpn.org/eng/stphmkr/index.html I haven't tried it out yet, but it supports aligning and batch-processing 3D images, among other features.
My stereo production toolchain is based on PIL and PIL reads MPOs. An MPO is just two JPGs concatenated together so they aren't hard to read. My photog friends swear by Stereo Photo Maker but in my book it is "just another image processing program by people who don't understand gamma correction" but Adobe Photoshop is dangerously close to that category too.
Did you know your index finger is roughly 1 IPD from nail to knuckle? This is useful:
Hold your phone sideways, look where your lens is in the horizontal axis and align your left index finger's knuckle such that you're holding the phone edge with it but your knuckle is lined up just above the lens... Snap a pic. (This will be your left eye pic.) — Now keep your left index straight as-is and with your right hand gently grip your phone and slide it horizontally such that the lens previously lined up above your knuckle is now aligned just below the tip of your left index finger nail. Now snap another pic. (This is your right eye pic.)
Now put them in a collage side by side in Photoshop or whatever, and make it small and cross your eyes. If you kept your alignment fairly you should now have a respectable 3D photo.
Voila! 3D photos on the cheap, as long as your subjects stand still between the two pics.
This
https://www.kandaovr.com/qoocam-ego
is probably the best easy-to-use stereo camera on the market today.
And thanks for Glider!
https://www.kandaovr.com/qoocam-ego
occasionally I've made a red-cyan anaglyph that has been really striking and I also view my stereograms with a Meta Quest 3. (Though I really want one of these to shoot pano https://us.kandaovr.com/products/obsidian-r)
I've done a lot of debugging as to why some images don't work as well as I expect them to, the last discovery I made it is the Ego has a little bit of pincushion distortion so objects in the L and R channels don't line up perfectly vertically and my stereographer friends all think that's bad. (I am transitioning now from "bored of photography" to "biggest studio project ever" so maybe I will find time to photograph a grid and make a filter to undo the pincushioning)
I think the best formula I've found for stereograms is a group portrait where the background is really far in the background. I slide the L/R channels horizontally to keep the image close to the paper which makes the image look like an ordinary photo but a little blurry/stylized but then you put on the glasses and wow. Other than that though it's been really hit or miss and I haven't really found "my vision" in stereography yet.
The two unassisted viewing options for the majority of people are either crossing your eyes or looking through the image to infinity. Intentional exotropia is completely off the table, because almost nobody can do that (because there's no natural point to doing it, unlike crossing which is how you look at things near your face).
And the problems with looking through the image to infinity are that
1) If the image is near you, you're now naturally focusing far away, which means you're not focusing up close on the image plane like you would be if your eyes were crossing, so the image is blurry without an unnatural muscle behavior.
2) If the image is meaningfully far away, the angular difference you can achieve between it and a horizon vanishing point is just too small to achieve overlap between the halves unless the image itself is very small, which you then won't be able to see anyway.
[edit]
Some people have asked how I read things that are up close if I can't cross my eyes; I close one eye.
You probably mean this differently than how I'm reading it, because distance of any image affects the required size for its contents to be discernible. Billboards are very large for a reason.
Triggering the two cameras was completely manual but worked almost all time, even when taking photos objects in slow motion, as example people o animals.
For this part of photography experimenting it is a bit unfortunately that all TV builders abandoned the 3D capability of their TV sets.
As near as I could tell at the time, the MPO format is literally just two JPEGs directly appended in one file.
Makes it a lot more accessable on the internet too :)
3-D pictures are very entertaining and atmospheric. I have a Kodak stereo camera that I've taken on trips to various countries since high school, and a 3-D projector and silver screen. With polarized glasses, you can walk right up to the screen and still see the depth.
After seeing it, people almost always asked where they could get this or why it isn't used more.
The movie studios deserve scorn for ruining the marketability of 3-D yet again by releasing one fake "3-D" movie after another, as we finally had really good and widespread 3-D projection available.
So you have to show the same movie in both formats which, as it see it, is something that costs money instead of making money, and is only going to work for movies big enough and theaters big enough to be able to do that. (e.g. the multiplex at the mall is part of a chain that teeters on the edge of bankruptcy so the local arthouse theater sometimes shows movies like "Deadpool & Wolverine" in their first run)
People associate 3-d with that kind of movie but actually the rapid cuts and motion of movies like that don't give your brain time to lock onto stereo whereas documentaries (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Station_3D) and dramatic content are really powerful.
I have some software that works like Disney's multiplane camera (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplane_camera) that I use for synthesizing stereo scenes (and other things) and one problem that turns up is that the curvature of objects hides some pixels from one eye but not the other eye. You can't just cut some objects out of the scene and slide those parts relative to each other but you've got to have something for those pixels or make something up. The flip side of that however is that a stereo picture of a close up of a person shows maybe 10-15% more area of the face which means more of the little muscles that indicate emotion. You are seeing a little bit more in a 3-d movie just as you see a little bit more when you see actors on stage and even if you're not aware of it consciously I think it adds to your emotional reaction.
(... so far that software has used a simple rendering approach but I'm very likely to upgrade it to do ray tracing because I want to get very accurate depth of field effects including occlusion)
Well, they didn't just "get stuck" there; they put themselves there. That was a choice. They should have shot in 3-D when they wanted to release in 3-D, and refrained from post-processed fake 3-D in all cases.
Seth Rogan said that he and... I don't remember, maybe the director of Green Hornet wanted to shoot in 3-D and the studio turned them down. After it was done, the studio changed its mind and made it into fake 3-D.
And yes, there's a misperception that "action" and "spectacle" movies are the best for 3-D. Wrong. The coolest 3-D pictures I've shot are often indoor scenes with lots of objects; for example, a long dinner table set with dishware and glasses, with an open door in the background revealing a cobblestone street.
Most people scoffing at "3-D" have probably seen almost none of it. Many people have only seen one legitimate 3-D movie: Avatar. Otherwise they might have seen a Pixar movie rendered in 3-D; or if they're lucky, Hugo. Or the Transformers one where they tear up Chicago. Most did not see Drive Angry.
Beyond that, I'm hard-pressed to name a modern movie shot in 3-D.
This article is a great reminder of what the web used to be and what some corners of the web still are: a smart, creative person using effort to share something they care about with the world.
I don't want AIs giving me sanitized informational summaries. I want meaningful stories told by people.
I love it.