[photo-3d] Re Cool Stereo Microscope

[Peter Homer <P.J.Homer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greg Erker Wrote


>  I went to a electronics tradeshow today
>and saw a very impressive stereo microscope.
>It was a Lynx from Vision Engineering:
>http://www.visioneng.com/stereo.htm
>
>  The most amazing thing is that you don't
>look into two small eyepieces. Rather you
>look into a 3x5" rounded window. So head
>position isn't critical. Glasses or no glasses
>aren't a problem. You get a true stereoscopic
>view of the item under the scope.

I checked the web site and apart from the Lynx it was much the same
information that I have in some literature from these people. I saw their
stand some years ago at the "Tomorrows World Live" exhibition and they also
featured on one of the "Tomorrows World" TV programme in the UK.The
programme had some footage of the animated ray path through the microscope
but being two dimensional itself was still not to clear. What it seemed to
do was split the light into two( probably the two stere channels) and
reflect one to the viewer while the other went to the top of the microscope
and reflected back and was then reflected to the viewer.
What they seem to use is the technique of placing a single large lens over
the two smaller ones, it is not a new idea and was used first for
stereoscopes.
Claudets "Stereomonoscope" worked this way but had a ground glass screen
between the two, which was not neccessary. Claudet noticed that the large
viewing screen of an ordinary large format camera produced a stereo
image,but this is just because the screen is large enough for both eyes to
view through and through the lens, but the screen tends to destroy the
directionality of the light rays and reduce the effect. James Clerk Maxwell
produced what he called "The real Image stereoscope" without the ground
glass. Colin Clay of the UK stereoscopic society has produced his own
version of Maxwells device. There was an article in "Stereo World" a while
back which featured a guy who had reinvented Claudets device with a ground
glass screen which he found he had to smear with castor oil as an index
matching liquid so that the frosting was almost eliminated for it to work.

>  The brochure talks about a multi-faceted
>rotating lenticular disk that has 3.5
>million pixels. The result is that the
>exit pupil it 64x larger than conventional
>eyepiece microscopes. Truely impressive.

This sounds as if it could actualy be describing a humble Fresnel lens of
some sort. Jeremy Hinton who is on this list is another rediscoverer of the
effect and he actualy carried out his experiments with Fresnel lenses and
mirrors as the single large lens. The only real advantage is cost Fresnel
lenses would degrade the image.       P.J.Homer



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