3D Photography

I messed around in MatLab today to discover it has a fairly simple video capturing API. So, I hooked up two webcams and wrote a quick little program to merge the two video streams in realtime into a single anaglyph video steam. The result: A realtime 3D video stream. Here’s a screenshot (yes, my webcams suck):

I’m thinking it would be neat to put the cameras in a plastic face at the show and let people look at themselves in 3D…

I started playing around with my simple point and shoot camera by taking a picture from one angle, moving it to the left a few inches (using my glasses as a guide), and then taking another picture.  Next, I used the directions at the bottom of this page to build a 3D image in Adobe Photoshop.  The whole process turned out to be quite easy.  Here’s a sample:

I did all of this using a pair of 3D glasses I made from a clear piece of plastic with two sharpied squares (red and blue).  This works quite well if you have a bit of an imagination, however, eventually you’ll get a killer headache as the color filtering is nowhere near perfect.

So I got two pairs of kickass 3D glasses.

I generally don’t like blogs.  However, every now and then I come across a blog that documents some interesting proccess as opposed to blabbing away about political opinions.  So, I’ve created this blog to document the techniques and progress of this show and get the word out.

Background on the show

A few months ago I was standing in the doorway of Twenty Goto Ten chatting with Benjamin Belsky and Chris Abad about Ben’s upcoming show.  At some point we started talking about t-shirts with 3D images on them and I came up with the idea of a hoodie with 3D glasses embedded into the hood.  We laughed about the idea but I couldn’t stop thinking about 3D artwork and the like.  I started watching 3D movies and even found a copy of Night of the Living Dead in 3D.

Eventually, I approached Chris and asked if he was interested in doing a 3D show.  We agreed it was a neat concept, so I started brewing ideas.  I settled on two things I’ve always fancied: Girls and Guns.  Next, I wanted to demonstrate a few techniques used to display 3D images.  So, put these ideas together and you get Girls with Guns displayed via a variety of methods in 3D.

Now on to shooting…