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FEATURED SITE: XYZ 360°
If you were lucky enough as a kid to have received a 3D View-Master, you know how much fun and awesome it was to watch your first pictures in 3D. The prinicple of 3D is simple enough: take a picture, make a copy and offset them by a few mm. Then, when you look into the viewer, each eye sees one photo and sends the signal separately to the brain. Our brain puts them back together as a 3D picture.
3D pictures fell by the wayside for a long long time and it looked like it would never come back again… until Avatar showed that you could make a 3D movie that did not suck or threw the spear at you at every turn. Suddenly, interest in 3D picked up. It’s funny this way, how technology first needs to progress to the point of being able to provide an experience that does not suck (for want of a better sounding term that encompasses what I want to convey here) before mass consumer adoption.
Take the smart phone, for example. Smart phones existed well before the iPhone came to market, but it was the latter which, in the way it integrated mature technologies together — and avoided immature ones (read, that sucked) — to storm the market. Ditto the iPad. Tablets existed before the iPad but they tried to force the technology to do things it was not yet ready to do, i.e. it sucked at doing those things we wanted it to do. Apple is great at taking only that which works very well (hence, no Flash).
What about 3D stills? Nay, I hear you say, and I’ll be the first to admit I am also not enthused by the 3D offerings we see today. But, like it or not, the technology is here to stay and maturing rapidly, whether in TVs, cameras or video cameras. It’s just a matter of time before 3D technology matures enough that a camera manufacturer (or someone like Apple) puts it all together to give us the View-Master all over again. Come to think about it, why isn’t Fisher-Price, owner of the brand, doing just that? Make easy-to-use 3D digicams that can then be printed out into reels and viewed through the View-Master, Wii 3D or another display technology?
Case in point: Visit Brazilian photographer Daniel Farjoun‘s site where he displays beautiful pictures of the Carnival of Brazil — in glorious 3D. OK, maybe not as glorious as Avatar but good enough to make you want to start taking 3D pics yourself. Of course, you’ll need a pair of Blue-Red glasses (I got a promotional one a while back and keep it safe and handy) and he even tells you how to make your own.
Visit XYZ 360° for: 3D and 360° pictures. Nice touch in the 360° pictures: he even adds the rain for a more immersive experience (I guess it actually rained during the parade).
source pixiq
And if you have never had the View-Master 3D [QuickPrice Check]
