3D Photography

I spent the last few days working on a human head in which to put two cameras. I started out with a female styrofoam head and cut it in half. Then, I hollowed out spaces for each camera just behind the eyes and punched through two holes. Next, I applied several layers of Liquitex to cover up the ugly styrofoam and, as a last step, sanded it with very fine grain sandpaper. I’ll position the head above an LCD monitor where you can see what the head sees in a real time anaglyph (red/blue) stream. Here are a few pics of the process.

After getting all the materials necessary to assemble the flyers, I finally sat down last night and put 500 of them together. This involved stamping each pair of glasses with the word “RIGHT” on the right side (with these glasses it’s not immediately clear which color is meant for which eye), affixing a glue dot to each pair, and then pressing the glasses onto the cards. It took about 3 hours to make 500. I figured out that if I did each state separately my muscle memory would kick in and speed things up. Now I have to figure out where to put these things…

Update (7/1): I finished the other 500 tonight only to realize Clubcard gave me 1500. I guess I should order another 500 glasses…

I stopped by Flax yesterday to collect some materials for a silver screen.  After testing on a few materials around my house and reading this excellent thread, I realized 3D polarization was going to be a bit more difficult than I thought.

Flax didn’t really have any paper that resembled the old silver screens so I picked up 3 shades of gray/silver sheets.  As a backup plan, I grabbed some foamcore and chrome metallic spray paint.  The paper sheets completely failed with the darkest one showing only a very slight effect.  However, the spray painted foamcore worked perfectly.  I also noticed it’s best to position the polarizing filter between the screen and the projector lens, not between the stage and the lens.  The angle of the polarizing sheet is also critical in that it must be exactly perpendicular to the light path, not parallel to the screen (although, if the light path is perpendicular to the screen then the filter will be parallel to the screen as well).

Here are a couple pictures of my test setup.  The polarizing sheet is not displayed because I haven’t mounted it yet.

In case you don’t have a pair of 3D glasses, there are always options.  I mentioned earlier I made a pair from a clear piece of plastic and two sharpie markers.  Or, if you don’t happen to have plastic sitting around, you can always use plastic wrap like this:

Wired also has a great blog article on several options.

Pavla and I worked up a flyer for the show tonight. All the credit goes to her for her excellent design taste and photoshop magic. Here it is:

I’ve ordered 1000 of these 3D glasses to affix to the back of each flyer with a glue dot so the viewer won’t have to travel far for a pair of 3D glasses. Make sure you bring your flyer and glasses to the show to view the rest of the anaglyphs.

The official date for the show will be July 12th. I’ll be adding all the usual event links soon.