P3D Re: Could 3 D photos become a trend?

["Greg Wageman" <gjw@xxxxxxxxxx>]

From: ZEXIAN SHEN <z.shen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>


>Why stereographs can not replace the regular photos as the mainstream
of
>photographs since there is a history of stereographs for over 100
years?
>Just such as stereo radio replaced the old radio. The problems are
>technologies, cost, easiness or social custom? What breakpoints could
the
>stereographs have to beat the regular photograhs? I think it is time
now for
>stereographs to take place of the regular photos in technologies, cost
and
>easiness(without the aid of special glasses and manufacturing
procedure)
>even though stereographs failed many times once.


I think that most people are perfectly happy with flat images, and see
no reason to adopt stereophotography as their normal format.  They see
it as an interesting curiosity, and most will happily view it if offered
the chance, but for most people the bug to do it themselves just never
bites.  Present company excluded, of course.

Perhaps if stereo photos cost exactly the same and were as easy to get
processed virtually anywhere and didn't require special viewers or
produce degraded image quality like cheap lenticulars do, then it would
replace conventional photography as stereo has replaced mono in audio.
But remember also that many people, myself included, still buy and use
monaural radios when circumstances warrant (for example, my bedroom
clockradio is mono).

Robert A. Heinlein in his novel, "The Door into Summer", single-handedly
invented the CAD system ("Drafting Dan").  In that same novel, the plot
of which involved time travel into the future via "cold sleep"
(cryogenic suspension) and back into the past via technology, he also
described newspapers in which the pictures were autostereographs.  In
this excerpt, the protagonist has just been resuscitated from a 30-year
hibernation:

  "Newspapers had not changed much, not in format.  This one was tabloid
size, the paper was glazed instead of rough pulp and the illustrations
were either full color, or black-and-white stereo-- I couldn't puzzle
out the gimmick on that last.  There had been stereo pictures you could
look at without a viewer since I was a small child; as a kid I had been
fascinated by ones used to advertise frozen foods in the '50s.  But
those had required fairly thick transparent plastic for a grid of tiny
prisms; these were simply on thin paper.  Yet they had depth."

If that's the way the images are presented, I think people would accept
them without a second thought, and produce them themselves if no
additional fuss were involved.  In the mean time, there're the rest of
us. :-)

     -Greg W. (gjw@xxxxxxxxxx)





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