Stereographer

The Nintendo 3DS is presumably (with over 75 million units sold) the most popular camera that takes 3D photos in the MPO format. Unfortunately, the original 3DS's cameras are rather poor: absolutely dreadful dynamic range and tons of color noise. However, they did improve the cameras on the New Nintendo 3DS, which I've never owned. I've even considered making some homebrew to apply computational photography techniques on the 3DS to reduce noise and improve dynamic range, but I'm not at a point in my life where I can justify that right now.

I was looking at my old 3DS photos just recently, and there's not much software to read MPO files, so this project looks pretty darn cool and I'll be checking it out.

Something that I'm sure some people aren't aware of is that the 3DS's 640x480 photos don't match the resolution or aspect ratio of the 15:9 400x240 (800x240, but halved horizontally for 3D) screen, so the 3DS photo gallery actually shows photos zoomed in by default. If you didn't know this, now you can revisit your 3DS photos and see extra photo for free by pulling down on the circle pad.

Edit: I should mention - I did say that there's not much software that reads MPO files, but one program that does is StereoPhoto Maker. https://stereo.jpn.org/eng/stphmkr/index.html I haven't tried it out yet, but it supports aligning and batch-processing 3D images, among other features.

I would love to play around with some consumer 3D stuff. Either some kit to take anaglyphs or a 3D camera. The Nintendo 3DS has a 3D camera as far as I understand and several years ago 3D image cellphones where a thing, too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_3D-enabled_mobile_phon...) This seems to have turned into a dead end, though. Oh, and the Lytro, too.

Canon released a lens to simplify stereoscopy: https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/rf5-2mm-f2-8-l-dual-fisheye...

I have one of these

https://www.kandaovr.com/qoocam-ego

occasionally I've made a red-cyan anaglyph that has been really striking and I also view my stereograms with a Meta Quest 3. (Though I really want one of these to shoot pano https://us.kandaovr.com/products/obsidian-r)

I've done a lot of debugging as to why some images don't work as well as I expect them to, the last discovery I made it is the Ego has a little bit of pincushion distortion so objects in the L and R channels don't line up perfectly vertically and my stereographer friends all think that's bad. (I am transitioning now from "bored of photography" to "biggest studio project ever" so maybe I will find time to photograph a grid and make a filter to undo the pincushioning)

I think the best formula I've found for stereograms is a group portrait where the background is really far in the background. I slide the L/R channels horizontally to keep the image close to the paper which makes the image look like an ordinary photo but a little blurry/stylized but then you put on the glasses and wow. Other than that though it's been really hit or miss and I haven't really found "my vision" in stereography yet.

Something not often considered is that cross-eyed stereograms allow for both better focus and (if desired by the artist) also stronger depth when someone is viewing the image without hardware assistance.

The two unassisted viewing options for the majority of people are either crossing your eyes or looking through the image to infinity. Intentional exotropia is completely off the table, because almost nobody can do that (because there's no natural point to doing it, unlike crossing which is how you look at things near your face).

And the problems with looking through the image to infinity are that

1) If the image is near you, you're now naturally focusing far away, which means you're not focusing up close on the image plane like you would be if your eyes were crossing, so the image is blurry without an unnatural muscle behavior.

2) If the image is meaningfully far away, the angular difference you can achieve between it and a horizon vanishing point is just too small to achieve overlap between the halves unless the image itself is very small, which you then won't be able to see anyway.

This is really cool! I've had a lot of fun using MiDaS[0] for creating stereograms and also in robotics for depth estimation.

[0] https://github.com/isl-org/MiDaS

If you take stereo photos and want a way to view them. Go to an Antique store and get a stereoscope. They can be purchased inexpensively. Have your photos printed on 5x7 with the images arranged like a stereo card. Perfect color, prints are inexpensive, if your willing to send away you can get photos on matte paper so they look better than most stereo cards.

A long time I used two small consumer cameras mounted on a rail side by side and combined the two photographs on my TV (which was 3D capable with simple passive goggles), which produced quite nice 3D photos.

Triggering the two cameras was completely manual but worked almost all time, even when taking photos objects in slow motion, as example people o animals.

For this part of photography experimenting it is a bit unfortunately that all TV builders abandoned the 3D capability of their TV sets.

This is great! I was once the proud owner of an HTC Evo 3D, a smartphone that took 3D photos and displayed them natively with a lenticular display. It also ran hot as hell and was pretty much unusable until I added after-market swipe-spelling and an alternative app browser. It also took MPO format pictures.

As near as I could tell at the time, the MPO format is literally just two JPEGs directly appended in one file.

You can also combine two images and flip them in a gif constantly to see it in 3d.

Makes it a lot more accessable on the internet too :)

There's a way to build a 3-D adapter setup (with mirrors) for an SLR-style camera that actually splits the image across horizontally, so you get two wide images instead of two narrow ones. Not sure if that's useful for a stereoscope, however. For video or projection, it would be superior.

3-D pictures are very entertaining and atmospheric. I have a Kodak stereo camera that I've taken on trips to various countries since high school, and a 3-D projector and silver screen. With polarized glasses, you can walk right up to the screen and still see the depth.

After seeing it, people almost always asked where they could get this or why it isn't used more.

The movie studios deserve scorn for ruining the marketability of 3-D yet again by releasing one fake "3-D" movie after another, as we finally had really good and widespread 3-D projection available.

I've been feeling a lot of "the web is dying" lately. When I search for something, the results are often SEO glurge, AI-generated nonsense, AI-generated nonsense directly in the search results, or some unholy combination of all three where the search engine AI-generates some sort of summary based on decade-old bullshit SEO glurge.

This article is a great reminder of what the web used to be and what some corners of the web still are: a smart, creative person using effort to share something they care about with the world.

I don't want AIs giving me sanitized informational summaries. I want meaningful stories told by people.

I love it.