Yesterday was so eventful I can’t make it pass by without blogging. I attended Lion King musical and it was very nice. It brought me back to childhood memories so vivid that I was jumping inside. I gotta admit, it lives in me and you should admit also that it lives in you! The only thing I wished that happened yesterday was me attending the Wimbledon final between Andy Roddick and Roger Federer (Congrats to the latter though). The other things that I did yesterday is attending my first 3D movie, that is Ice Age 3. What fascinated me about that movie is how simply a light polarizer can change that fuzzy 2D image to 3D.
From a theoretical point of view, it’s darn easy. But if someone knows a real director I’d be thankful if he/she asked if it’s easy to do practically. It’s all about how to create an illusion of depth as a third dimension. How’s that done? Easy peasy. All you need is two cameras set facing each other with 90-degree mirrors in between to bring in the scene in. Each camera will work as one of our eyes. Of course, for the cameras to work like our eyes they have to be in perfect synchronization and in identical shooting specs. The rest of the trick is done within our eyes and brain. Our brain will interpret each of the images seen in each eye as single three-dimensional image. I expect some geek somewhere in the world to pop up and say “Dude! That’s old school!”. Well yeah of course, I’m speaking to non geeks. Every 3d movie we see in the movie industry is created in some alteration of what I’ve just explained. Of course, it’s easier to do now that CGI is used almost in every movie there is in Hollywood!
To go more deeply, The nowadays used technology is based on polarizing filters that either linearly (90 degrees of each other) or circularly (right handed for one and left handed for another) polarize the two images and then superimpose them on top of each other. To depolarize the images (using cheap polarizing eyeglasses, almost same material in sunglasses), is to let each eye see one image and trick the brain. For linearly polarized images we use orthogonal polarizers to see each image and for circular images we use same for same (right for right and left for left) polarizers. When we polarize a superimposed image that contains two polarized images (yes two polarizations occur, like encoding and decoding), each filter will only show one of the two images which is exactly what’s required for 3d imagery!
Pretty simple, huh?
