In the previous article we talked about how we shot our footage in stereo. Now we are going to talk about how to render those stereo images for 3D glasses. And how to render Papervision3D for 3D glasses.

There are many techniques for displaying stereoscopic 3D images. We opted for Anaglyph, the one you need the red/cyan glasses to view, since those are the glasses people are most likely to have laying around somewhere. Also these are the least expensive glasses of the lot and that mattered since we were also going to do a mailing of Barcinski & Jeanjean 3D glasses.

In short, an anaglyph image is obtained by taking the red color channel from the left camera and combining it with the blue & green color channels from the right camera. The drawback of this technique however, is the loss of color information, mostly affecting the red color component. So that was an issue we had to take into account as to what colors we would use in the website. Black doesn’t suffer in any way by anaglyph, so that kind of pushed us towards a basic graphic black & white design for the intro and menu cube.

On to rendering Papervision3D in anaglyph! For our website we have created an AnaglyphView class which offers anaglyph renedering in Papervision3D with the ease of use of the BasicView class. Click on the image below to view the demo. Toggle anaglyph rendering on and off by clicking on the Stage.

The AnaglyphView has one camera and two viewports. For each frame it moves the camera to the left, renders the camera projection to the left viewport, then moves the camera to the right, renders the camera projection to the right viewport and finally moves the camera back to it’s initial position. This way you still have complete freedom of camera movement in between the renders. Best is to use a Target Camera and move the target object to the focus point, creating the same mechanics as our eyes when focusing.

The left and right viewports are combined using ColorTransforms and BlendModes. While this offers a fast way of combining the two channels to an anaglyph image it is important to note that the viewports will not render correctly when not completely opaque. That’s why the AnaglyphView uses extended Viewport3D classes that make sure the viewports have a background filled with the supplied background color.

To combine 2D stereo images with 3D stereo rendering you need to attach the 2D stereo images to their respective viewports. That’s what we did in our website. The left panorama video is added to the DisplayList of the left viewport and the right video to the DisplayList of the right viewport.

Needless to say stereo rendering in Papervision3D can be very heavy. Your aim would be to keep the scene as simple is possible and limit the redraw regions as much as possible. We’ll be going into some optimization tricks in our article covering the Papervision3D side of our website.

Feel free to download the AnaglyphView class and start playing with it. The example above is also included in the package.

Finally, with some delay, we continue with our series of articles about the making of our website.

One of the objectives of the panorama scene was to capture as much information as possible. So besides capturing the scene itself we captured the motion of the subjects in the scene by creating a stop motion panorama. By shooting in stereo (with two camera’s instead of one) we also captured the depth in the scene.

Package with Loreo 3D Lens In A Cap in it

I started experimenting with stereo photography in December last year when I first bought a 3D lens in a cap from Loreo. A Hong Kong based company that manufactures some unusual photo accessories. This lens was great fun experimenting with, but has some serious drawbacks by design. First off it’s fairly cheap, so the quality of the lens is quite low. Secondly you can only shoot in portrait mode with a very small field of view.

Picture taken with the Loreo 3D-lens-in-a-cap

A far better way of capturing stereo imagery is by using two identical camera’s outfitted with identical lenses. That’s the solution we opted for. Mark owned a Canon 350D and I was already wanting to buy an DSLR for a long time, so decided to buy the same. So maybe it wasn’t the latest DSLR technology available but since this model had already been replaced with a newer one it was actually a bargain.

The two cameras were mounted on a tripod with an adjustable distance bar, allowing to slide the camera’s closer or further apart from each other depending on the desired effect. We synchronized the two shutters by using two sets of RF remote controls dialed in on the same channel. That way we could fire the two shutters simultaneously with one remote control.

For ease of production we decided to shoot us and the panorama separately. The Amsterdam panorama shoot presented quite a few challenges. Since we wanted a very dynamic scene with lots of movement we had to do the shoot during a busy time of the day. Add to that the fact that we had to stand in the middle of the bridge, forcing cars and vans to drive past our tripod with just a few inches of clearance and you’re starting to get an idea of the difficulty of the task. See, since we were going to add us in the scene later on we had to make sure no objects or people would appear at the spot we’re supposed to stand, forcing us to wait for an object to clear that area before continuing our circle. But at the same time we needed to keep a constant interval between the 144 frames to avoid people and moving objects to suddenly warp ahead in time.

The second shoot of us was way less stressing. We had purchased a green screen fabric from EEFX a few months before and asked photographers Géraldine Jeanjean & Ringel Goslinga to help us out with the lighting. Instead of moving the camera’s around us, requiring a green room rather then just a green screen, it is actually us that are rotating by 2.5° for each frame. Notice the printed circle on the floor which we used as reference to position our feet.

At this point I would like to point out that we had no budget to produce this website and therefore chose for the DIY approach and took a lot of shortcuts. If we were to do this with sufficient budget the end result could be really polished and consistent throughout. Yes, for the ones that noticed; correct camera perspective, consistent lighting etc.

Also, stereo photography is way more complicated then it initially looks. There are quite a few things to take into account, some of them we have omitted. However, the intention is to produce new panorama’s for the website in the future, so we’ll have some more opportunities to improve our stereo photography.

Next post I’ll write about what to do with those stereo images. How do you turn them into images that can be viewed with those fancy retro 3D glasses? And we’ll be sharing some code on how to render Papervision3D in anaglyph.

Well, here it is. After 3 months of hard work fun our “Coming Soon” page has finally been replaced by a brand new website. The coming weeks we will be posting a series of “Making of” articles about our use of Papervision3D, Vectorvision, 3D Physics, Photography and more. Today a few lines on the general concept of the website. 

The vision for the panorama view came to us in november last year while we were brainstorming on another project (the one for which we prototyped a spherical video panorama). We would stand in one of Amsterdam’s many beautiful scenes with everybody around us walking by going about their business. Around us our portfolio work would be hanging in the air in the form of paper flyers. Envisioning viewing that with 3D glasses being able to move around us, filled us with excitement. We are already familiar with viewing photo’s and movies with 3D glasses, but I can’t really say I had had an interactive experience using 3D glasses before. 

By creating a 360º panorama from a stop motion video rather than from multiple stills stitched together, allowed us to capture the movement of the subjects in the scene. The price to pay however was much bigger file size. To make up for the wait while the video content preloads before being granted access to the panorama view we thought it would be cool to revamp the traditional Pong waiting game into a solitary 3D version that could also benefit from viewing with 3D glasses.

But the added file size was worth it. When we first reached the point in development that we had a placeholder 360º video panorama overlaid with a badly keyed-out test shoot of us taken in from of a purple screen (yes, we hadn’t ordered the green screen yet), that we realized just how interesting it actually is to gently turn the 360º and observe the many people, boats and occasional “motor agent”, as they call them here in Holland, pass by.

The location was almost an automatic choice. Besides the fact that it’s beautiful, it’s right around the corner from our studio. But this is mearly the first panorama to feature on the site. As it’s simply a question of modifying some XML to change the panorama in the website, and, well, shooting the new footage of course, we plan on adding new panoramas to the site in the future, probably starting with a new shoot this fall.

We are currently working on our own website, which is a lot of fun. Since the website still needs a lot of work we made a little Coming Soon page which gives some hints of what the website is going to contain. If you have some 3D glasses laying around you are in for a little Anaglyph treat. The 3D fonts are also quite special. These are Vector fonts rendered in the Papervision3D engine. More about vectors in Papervision3D coming in a later post. Meanwhile, check this.