Anaglyph Stills
For all its wonder, the computer screen only offers two dimensions. There is only so much emersion you can get from two dimensions. To achieve three dimensions with a computer screen, you need a mechanism to provided different views to each eye. There are many techniques for achieving this, and each technique offers a tradeoff between cost, equipment, and quality. Using the anaglyph technique, only a cheap pair of red/cyan glasses are necessary. The 3D effect is achieved by the coloring on the glasses. The image is shaded using the red component from one source image, and the blue/green (cyan) components from another. The glasses mask one of the two images so each eye sees a unique image. If the images are produced correctly, the viewer will see a 3D scene.
For the images created below, a single Canon Digital Rebel XT was used with a LOREO beam splitter lens. A landscape orientation shot is taken through the lens and two separate portrait side-by-side mages are captured to the digital image. Because the images are captured with some horizontal separation, the combined view perceived through the anaglyph depiction technique is roughly what a normal person would see from the camera's point of view. Since red and cyan are used to masked the anaglyph image, the view is often suffers when red or cyan shades are present. Several techniques are used to get around this problem. One way to avoid coloring conflicts is to convert the image to grayscale first. A better way is to optimize the colors so that the shading still exists, but without sever conflict with the shading of the glasses. This technique maps conflicting colors to "safer" anaglyph colors. The stereo LOREO rig is shown on the next page.