Viewing stereo pairs on a 3D monitor

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rjlittlefield
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Viewing stereo pairs on a 3D monitor

Post by rjlittlefield »

One of my colleagues outside the forum has a laptop that's capable of playing 3D movies with shutter glasses.

I suggested to him that we try to figure out how to reformat stereo pairs to display on it.

Turns out that for his display the "reformatting" was very simple.

All that was necessary was to download one of my crossed-eye stereo pairs from the forum and change its extension from .JPG to .JPS .

Double-clicking the JPS file then launched a viewer provided with his system that read the file and did whatever was needed to make it appear on the display with left/right views properly synced with the glasses. Hey presto, up popped up a 3D image!

We tried also using StereoPhoto Maker to do an Open Stereo Image on the JPG and then Save Stereo Image with a type of JPS. That worked fine too, producing a JPS file that no longer needed StereoPhoto Maker but opened with just double-click.

I'm curious to know, do such simple techniques work for other people also, or do you know of other techniques for accomplishing the same task?

--Rik

DQE
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Post by DQE »

I've been wondering if our new 3D-capable LCD TV can be enticed to display 3D stereo pairs, especially when fed from a PC and/or an iPad 3? My PC is connected to an ordinary LCD monitor and is also connected to the TV via an HDMI cable from one of its video cards (2 Nvidia 560 Ti cards in an SLI configuration).

The 3D TV is the LG brand, and it also synthesizes some sort of apparently useful 3D image from ordinary 2-D HDMI inputs. Thus, I have wondered if the vendor is using some variation of the techniques Rik uses in Zerene to create a convincing and enjoyable stereo pair from a single image.

Wouldn't it be great if we could use our newer 3D-capable generic LCD TVs for viewing 3D macro photos?!!? I suspect it needs to be fed from a PC to do this but there are just enough gaps in my understanding of the 3D imaging chain in her new TV to be confusing. Perhaps its ordinary 3D synthesis options would work just fine if fed a single 2D macro image and set to produce a synthesized 3D final image?

(We're just now getting the new TV hooked up and my knowledge is mostly theoretical at the moment.)
-Phil

"Diffraction never sleeps"

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

When you get that thing hooked up, I'd be interested to hear some results. According to HERE, some TV's can read MPO files directly from a USB thumbdrive. The Wikipedia article on image file formats lists three for stereo images -- JPS, PNS, and MPO -- and both JPS and MPO can be created by StereoPhoto Maker (SPM). I can't find PNS (stereo PNG) in SPM's menus, and SPM lists another STJ format that the SPM documentation describes as "a special format for Japanese 3D mobile phones which are made by NTT DoCoMo. It is similar to JPS."

Anyway, I'm thinking JPS and MPO would be good things to try.

--Rik

PS. If you now feel like you're swimming in TLS [Three Letter Soup], join the crowd!

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

I ran some tests this afternoon at the local TV store. They had a Samsung 7000 and a Panasonic ST50[*] set up for 3D display.

We inserted a thumbdrive containing several different file formats, told the TV to display photos from the media, and got the same behavior on both systems:
  • .JPS files were invisible, as if they did not exist.
  • .MPO files were visible and displayed as stereo
  • .JPG files were visible and displayed as flat images (if actually a stereo pair, the pair was displayed side by side).
The .MPO files that displayed correctly were generated by StereoPhoto Maker by opening a parallel-layout stereo pair and then doing a File > Save MPO File. (MPO files that were generated by just saving from a crossed-layout stereo pair had inverted depth.)

Files whose original layout was 3840x1080 (LR@1920x1080) were displayed as full-screen stereo. Files whose original layout was LR@960x1080 were displayed as a narrower stereo image, centered in a blank screen that preserved the aspect ratio of the original.

Reading various articles, it seems to me that 3D display systems currently break neatly into two non-overlapping categories:
- computers with 3D displays that need .JPS files
- 3D TVs that need .MPO files.

Fortunately, both formats can be generated by StereoPhoto Maker from the same source with just a couple of extra button clicks.

--Rik

[*] Both models identified verbally -- I didn't hunt for the full and exact numbers..[/size]

DQE
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Post by DQE »

Rik,

Very interesting and very informative, as well as very useful in an immediately applicable sense - thanks!

Did you pick up any sense of what the major TV vendors are doing to synthesize 3D from a single 2D image?
--------------------

(My partner hasn't been well of late, and so we've had to postpone completing our setup and learning curve experiences with her new 3D LG (LCD) TV. It has some sort of ability to synthesize 3D from 2D. Many ad-hoc user reviews claim the synthesis actually works fairly well and some even say they now watch everything in synthesized 3D, using the supplied glasses. She'll be very glad to learn that we can further enhance our shared bug and bug photography hobby in 3D, using her new partially commissioned TV. Yet I still have some anxiety about carefully viewed synthesized 3D bug photos potentially running into issues...)
-Phil

"Diffraction never sleeps"

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

DQE wrote:Did you pick up any sense of what the major TV vendors are doing to synthesize 3D from a single 2D image?
No, I was only concerned with which of my own creations did and did not display correctly.

--Rik

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