P3D Re: Bowl and stereo lies

[jacob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Gabriel Jacob)]

Harolddd writes,
>Here is the interesting part for me. I sometimes hand the viewer 
>to friends with the flat dinosaur slide, and say "Wow, look at 
>this 3-D slide!" So far not a single person has objected and said 
>that it is NOT 3-D. When I tell them it is flat they just seem 
>dumbfounded. Ok, I know it isn't nice to deceive people, but I was 
>trained as a social psychologist and old habits are hard to break.
>The response of my "subjects" causes me to wonder whether people 
>are sincere when they praise the depth of stereo slides.

I have had this experience with people too, but it wasn't I trying
to deceive but rather the other way around! What happened was this
friend of mine from the Ukraine, knew I was into 3-D since I had
told him I had a FED that comes from there. He never heard of it but
he did tell me he had a 3-D viewer that he brought from his country
when he immigrated to Canada.

Anyways, one day he brought it over and he showed me a very
interesting slide viewer, but it wasn't 3-D! He tried to persuade
me that it was and he truly believed it. I didn't have to give it a
second glance to know it wasn't a 3-D image but looked at it again
to see how come he was so mistaken. The only thing I could conclude
was that due to the rather poor optics the image was distorted. This
was probably due to the stress points in the cheap plastic lens. I
tried to explain my observations to him, to no avail and it was
only when I showed him some real 3-D pictures that I finally convinced
him! When he saw real stereo pictures he exclaimed that these are
REAL 3-D images with depth and from his reaction I could tell he
wasn't faking it (and I don't mean the other kind!).

BTW, even though the slide viewer was kind of crappy optically,
it was very interesting. He told me this was sold at tourist
locations, with the photographer taking 2 different (2-D) slide
images of people. The images are then inserted permanently into
the viewer. The viewer itself was pretty novel in that it was
shaped exactly like a baseball and about the same size. To view
the two separate images, you viewed them from one of the two
corresponding lenses. I guess this is where the confusion might
have arised for him, since he knew that stereo involved 2 images. 
The way the lenses were arranged you couldn't look through both at
the same time.

P.S. Isn't the power of suggestion amazing!
P.P.S. No I am not trying to suggest anything, in the above statement. ;-)

Gabriel


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End of PHOTO-3D Digest 2506
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