8/14/2003: Fake (?) 3D in animated GIF

Wave to ndetroit for pointing this one out.

f r e a k y !

A guy named Jim Gasperini (link NSFW !) experiments here with creating a stereo image by putting the left and right sides of a stereoscopic image into an animated GIF.

Now the next question will be what use it is? -- I don't know, it does give you more visual information than a simple photo.

That can be done in 20 seconds in Microsoft GIF Animator!

Phhhhtttt, yeah right. Good God, man, you are SO WRONG. You remind me of the type of person who mistakes jpgs for gifs!

(Seriously though, that is a very striking effect.)

(Oh yeah - and how NSFW is it? Is it like hardcore porn NSFW? Or is it artsy nudity? Or just lots of swearing? Hmm?)

Dunno, but I think I just had a seizure from watching it

Just kidding. Pretty cool, though.

(It's only NSFW if you're in a cubicle or are stupid enough to have your monitor facing your door of your office. Otherwise, it's the same type of nudity you see on TV commercials.)

That first dude has his ween showing.

I don't want to see certain parts of the anatomy wagging out there in space. Neat effect. The link is NSFW, so I don't know if he was the same person who demonstrated this on TV way back in the early 80's. I believe it was on That's Incredible.

Yeah, but it's so dark, you can hardly see it. (I know - I tried really really hard.)

I got a good chuckle out of "ween". Hehehe.

Hey, nifty! Maybe I will try to do this with some of my stereo photos.

I dunno about you folks, but for me it looked like some kind of aborted-in-the-middle sequence from Matrix...

Cool thing is, these work for people with one eyebulb, or are otherwise unable to get twin pictures to fuse.

I think this technique is brilliant. 3D without glasses. Okay, so it jerks around, but still...

Okay, it really is a nifty effect, but am I the only one who started to feel a little seasick after about 30 seconds of watching it?

I'm actually really surprised that more pr0n sites haven't latched onto this technology. In a market so completely oversaturated with product, it sure would be nice to have a key technological differentiator.

....



ps: dave, i thought your comment was pretty funny, even if most everyone else missed it..

Net nailed it. Pop-ups and banners for the porn boys.

Yeah, but you actually have to be in the business of creating your own porn in order to get the two different shots required to make the 3d-ish image. I would think that that would sigificantly narrow down the prospective people who could do such a thing.

If you want 3-D pr0n there are regularly 50s era pingup stereo slides for sale on ebay. They're usually on the pricy side, at least for my budget--they rarely go for less than $10 per slide. There's also this and this. One photographer who's done a lot of nudes said on a stereo photography mailing list said that he's been able to get some publishers interested in his photos, but they just want to publish them as 2-D images, not stereo.

I meant just the advertising, Juju. On a site like Consumptionjunction where the page is outlined with porn banners, it would stand out.

Proof of a concept

If my toes ain't tappin' then don't come a rappin'

<img src="http://www.newzucanuze.com/images/Proof.gif">

What's that, uh, thing, hanging between his legs? Is it his ween? Or is it an unfortunately-placed tab to snap into his chair? Either way, it's a hoot. Did you do that in 20 seconds on Microsoft GIF animator?

Hehe. Ween! There it is again.

I was wondering what the hell you guys were talking about for just a few seconds there. I even went to this guy's site, and didn't see any of it. I was starting to think this was like those crap-tacular "stereo images" that were so popular in the mall back in the 90's, because I still can't see what's going on with those damn things. Then it dawned on me...

Cool, I can get my face really close to the monitor and pretend I'm in a eartquake. The ultra-calm naked people kind of destroy the illusion though.

Hmmm, an interesting exercise, but I'll stick with more traditional stereo presentations. The rotational effect is disturbing (and it's more pronounced in a shot like this that has a distance between the closest and farthest objects), and the color reduction to GIF is not flattering.

OK I've edited this to brin it up to a better size.

Still a bitchin' first try, though, SD. More, please?

Maybe

See, the thing is, I have a vintage 1950s stereo camera that is relatively "idiot-proof". It take a left and right view simultaneously--the shutter and aperture are synchronized. The only problem is it's completely manual so you have to calculate the exposure with a light meter or by visual estimation. But the resulting film chips are pretty easy to put into a cardboard mount and view nicely in an appropriate viewer. The nature of the camera makes it hard to mess things up.

But turning them into digital is another story. I'm interested in doing it, but when you do that, you open yourself up to a plague of problems that aren't really issues when you're putting the slides together. For example, the fact that the images are captured on the same strip of 35mm film practically guarantees (barring a bizarre camera alignment problem) that your images are going to be parallel to each other. But the slightest discrepancy in digitizing the two images results in rotational errors that need to be accounted for. And there is software to handle such things, but it requires technique I haven't practiced.

It would help if I had a slide scanner, but I don't--just a slide copier attachment for my Nikon Coolpix 995.

After investigating the link on hot_pastrami's thread re: public health posters, I found some cool stereo images on the same site
here.

I keep meaning to try my hand at making one of these myself.

But it occurs to me, is there any real reason not to try more than 2 frames, other than our bias about having 2 eyes, and the difficulty of taking more shots without the subject moving? Taken to it's extreme, you get "bullet time" in effect, but I wonder if 3 or 4 frames could be more convincing than 2.

Holy Cow! I wonder if I could get the rights to the Calcutta Dinosaur BBQ?

I am so gonna fry for that.

The saddest thing about this is that people are always saying we drive cows down the streets here in Kansas City, and in Calcutta, they just let 'em go wherever they want.