Stereoscoper and the Depth of Awesomeness
A few days ago I got a shiny new toy: a 3d camera from thinkgeek (I’d link to it, but it seems to have disappeared from their catalogue). I’m a massive fan of 3d photos / video, so it’s pretty cool to have a device that allows me to take stereoscopic photo pairs simultaneously (you can do it manually with a static scene, but those get boring).
Sadly (although not surprisingly), the quality is not great. The limited resolution is not really an issue given how you’re likely to view them, but the pictures come out awkwardly stretched to half the expected horizontal resolution. They are also pre-combined in a single JPEG, they are the way around for cross-eyed viewing, and the colour balance is frequently off between the two sensors (which can be really jarring).
Seeing a lot of manual photo fixing in my future, I set out to automate it. And thus stereoscoper was born, as a way to bulk-convert stereo images to other formats. Aside from the obvious geometry changes (the horizontal resolution and image placement), I also learnt all about histogram matching in order to make the colour balance consistent across stereo pairs. And in order to make animated gifs that match up nicely, there’s even an interactive mode where you can fine-tune the alignment of the image pairs.
In the wiggly-animated spirit of 3ERD (note: some images there are NSFW), here’s some fun we had in the park with my new toy:
(click to toggle each animation. It’s off by default to save your brain from having a fit ;)
Update: Click the (stereo) link under each image for a cross-eyed viewing version.