Re: this just in from NASA

[P3D John W Roberts <roberts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Date: Wed, 9 Jul 1997 23:55:09 -0500
>From: P3D Peter Abrahams  <telscope@xxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: this just in from NASA

>This NASA publicity report seems to indicate anaglyph viewing, rather than
>the sequential goggles.

>MARS PATHFINDER MISSION STATUS
>July 9, 1997
>3 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time
>.....On a lighter note, Dr. Peter Smith, principal investigator 
>of the IMP team, shared some of his personal insights on what 
>it's like to be living on local Mars time, which means working on 
>a 24-hour, 37-minute clock each day.  

>     "When you say good morning, and the sun is setting, now 
>that's living on Martian solar time.  When your sunglasses start 
>looking like this (holding up the red-and-blue stereo glasses 
>used to view images in 3-D), that's living on Martian time. 

Whose words are those in the parentheses - yours, the writer's/narrator's,
or Dr. Smith's?

It's possible, but I know of two pieces of evidence to the contrary:
 - I saw a photograph (in a newspaper?) of the NASA Administrator
   and others viewing an early image, and their glasses had substantial
   frames - large enough to contain the LCS electronics, and much more
   bulky than would be logical for anaglyph glasses.
 - During the press conference I mentioned two days ago, one of the researchers
   commented that they would like to get the stereo images out to the public
   as soon as possible, but that they had to be *converted* to a format
   that the public could use. If they were already anaglyph conversion
   wouldn't be much of an issue, and NASA has released anaglyphs from
   previous missions (e.g. the Magellan mission to Venus), so they would
   not regard anaglyph as something the public couldn't use.

Speaking of making the images available to the public, I'm not sure I properly
understood one aspect of the .jps image format - part of the discussion on
P3D seems to indicate that the file provides the stereo information and you
can view it with whatever stereo technology you have handy, and part of the
discussion seems to indicate that the file can be organized in a number of
formats, each intended for use with a particular viewing technology. Could
someone please explain this again?

If the .jps files can be used in multiple ways, perhaps that would be a good
way for NASA to make the stereo images available online.

John R


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