Re: Titanic 3D images

[P3D Shelley, Dan <dshelley@xxxxxxxx>]

>> At the moment I am working on a series of 3D images (pairs, 
anaglyphs, 
>> and hopefully JPS LCD) of the Titanic, at the bottom of the ocean. 
<deleted>
>
>Emory Kristof from National Geographic actually shot some 
>3D video of the Titanic back in about 1992.  He used a pair 
>of underwater cameras and two betacam decks. <deleted>

Sounds wonderful. I would love to see this stuff... Too bad I most 
likely never will!!!! AUGH!

>p.s. what is JPS LCD format?  

Basically, (non technical description follows... anyone who wants to 
better it, please do...) JPS is a new image format being developed by 
several companies that produce liquid crystal stereo glasses. It 
consists of a pair of stereo images, side by side in one JPG image, 
saved with the extension JPS. Special software reads the JPS extension 
and allows the viewer (with LCD/LCS glasses) to see the stereo scene in 
full color, as one image, with no flicker (assuming the video card and 
monitor are of good enough quality). This can result in full screen, 
full color, sharp stereoscopic 3D images. Assuming you can display 16 
or 32 million colors, this can be very impressive! (I on the other hand 
have only recently started tinkering with this system, and find it a 
bit difficult to get stunning results yet as alignment MUST be perfect 
as the large image size does not forgive at all...

>Does JPS refer to the JPEG compression 
>format?  If so, be careful... JPEG is lossy 
>compression and can therefore lead to 
>crosstalk in 3D interlaced images.  GIF 
>format would probably be better (unless a 
>very low JPEG compression ratio is used).

This was discussed in an answer post already, but I will repost that 
answer as it is correct... 

"JPEG can be lossy, but doesn't have to be.  Just set the quality to 
100%.  Unless you are satisfied with less than 256 colors, JPG is 
always preferable to .GIF.  This also holds for 256 levels in 
monochrome. With quality set to 100%, a 256 color Jpeg will be almost 
of identical size to a 256 color gif of the same image" 

This issue was discussed several years ago on this list and I made some 
sample images which used to be on the Photo-D FTP site. I just checked, 
and they were lost at some point in one of the hacker attacks, or 
something. The basic results were that a GIF at 256 colors (and no more 
as the y format will not support it) can look good on a system with a 
video driver that displays 256 colors or more, but will not look any 
better if the driver can show 16 or 32 million colors. Say that GIF was 
100k in size. The same (original, not the GIF version) image saved as a 
100% JPEG will PROBABLY be in the neighborhood of 40k to 60k in size, 
and contain information that will allow equipment capable users to view 
16 million colors. Side by side, these images both look good at 256 
colors, so much so that it would be VERY difficult to tell them apart. 
At 16 Million, the difference would be obvious. The extra bonus is that 
MOST times, the JPG file will be smaller than the GIF, and therefore 
will load faster on the Web, and reduce the amount of data transferred 
from your web server which is how some ISP's decide what to bill you... 
Enough rambling... Hope I presented the old discussion well enough! =)

>I guess the "LCD" refers to Liquid Crystal Shutter 
>glasses. The group informally decided to use the 
>abbreviation "LCS" some months back to avoid 
>misuse of the term "LCD" (because there are
>no LC displays used) and to avoid confusion with 
>HMDs (Head mounted Displays) which do use LCDs.

I remember this discussion, and was not personally convinced that the 
name needed changing. An example that left me unconvinced? ALL LC_ 
glasses require LCDBIOS to run games. Why instill confusion when there 
are accepted trade names built around LCD? Yes, there is no actual, 
stand-alone LCDisplay involved, but it can be construed that the 
LCShutters together with your monitor are an LCD system. MHO.

>Incidentally I tend to use the term "3D interlaced" to 
>refer to images which are interlaced for viewing with 
>LCS glasses.

I am NO EXPERT by any means on this, but in my limited experience, 
there appears to be a difference between JPS and older Interlaced 
images on the web. Someone who knows, am I wrong?

Thanks for the feedback Andrew!

Dan Shelley
dshelley@xxxxxxxx


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