Ortho vs. Computer Displays

[T3D Michael Gordon <mgordon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think you can forget orthoscopic viewing on a computer, unless you have
a headrest that places the viewer at a fixed and controllable distance
from the monitor.  I have tried a variety of methods for computer screen
viewing.  Cross-eyed viewing has the advantage of being less particular
for the monitor being used, but a long period of looking at a monitor
crosseyed leaves me unable to do anything "normal" for a while; as does
freeviewing of parallel images.  The relaxing of my eyes is difficult to
reverse especially as I am nearsighted; after a period of free-viewing I
find myself unable to focus on anything closer than about six feet, even
with my eyeglasses on!

Over/Under works very well and makes effective use of the monitor's
pixels, but demands horizontally composed images.  It is also very
sensitive to the kind of monitor (size and flatness) you have.  I want to
make a CD-ROM also, I even have the scanner and CD-ROM recorder, but I
will have to make a computer program that loads each image distinctly and
can be taught, globally and for each image, how to place them.  Then, the
viewer can store different global values pertaining to the size of his
screen.  Over/Under eliminates flicker caused by alternating frame devices
and is certainly cheaper, but imposes a size requirement on the viewing
monitor.

The most flexible system is to have left and right images distinct and
permit the viewer to select the desired viewing system -- side by side
normal, reversed (for crosseyed viewing), over/under, CrystalEyes, VR
devices, and so on.  You would also permit limiting the slide show to
vertical or horizontal orientations, and you could allow the images to be
rescaled so that a vertical image in a horizontal (over/under) system
could either be resized to fit entirely, or the left and right edges
extended to fit and the top and bottom cropped, or even stretched but that
would not be very pretty.  You could even have these images in a left and
right directory, and allow two computers network access to the CD-ROM,
with a pair of video projectors using polarized light; or fanciest of all,
a scanning laser projection system.

Back to the topic -- since a monitor is close to your eyes, the images I
make for computer viewing are heavily masked to make the stereo window
approximately on the same plane as the glass; especially since some
ambient light will be illuminating the monitor creating a real plane.
With the computer, this masking is easy, but you want images that don't
suffer from having nearly 63 mm chopped off one edge.

Sincerely,
Michael Gordon



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