Panasonic's consumer-grade 3D camcorder leaks out, the HDC-SDT750
Update: Looks as if even more images and purported specifications have leaked out ahead of the official reveal.
[Thanks, John]
Showing posts with label stereoscope. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stereoscope. Show all posts
Monday, July 26, 2010
Update: Looks as if even more images and purported specifications have leaked out ahead of the official reveal.
[Thanks, John]
Monday, November 2, 2009
Animated stereoviews of old Japan
from: http://rorr.im/digg.com/arts_culture/cool_3d_like_animated_stereoviews_of_old_japan/
In the late 19th and early 20th century, enigmatic photographer T. Enami (1859-1929) captured a number of 3D stereoviews depicting life in Meiji-period Japan.
A stereoview consists of a pair of nearly identical images that appear three-dimensional when viewed through a stereoscope, because each eye sees a slightly different image. This illusion of depth can also be recreated with animated GIFs like the ones here, which were created from Flickr images posted by Okinawa Soba. Follow the links under each animation for the original stereoviews and background information.
[Geisha washing their hands in the garden]
[Torii gates at Inari shrine, Kyoto]
[Geisha girls with flowers and cat]
[Traveler in the mountain fog near Chujenji]
[Tokyo Industrial Exposition, Ueno Park, 1907]
[Campfire on the peak of Mt. Myogi, Nakasendo]
[Geisha drinking beer in the park]
Thursday, November 20, 2008
A Geek’s Guide: How To Pimp Your Car With Linux
Author: Jesse Casman
Author’s note: I was intending to research and write a piece on how Linux is being used as an mp3 player in cars. I’ve owned a Linux based mp3 player for six years. I was assuming it was not the only solution. It’s not, but as of the fall of 2008, buying a Linux-based mp3 player for your car is not super easy.
If you’ve just started using Linux, you’ve probably noticed an interesting phenomenon. You’ve entered a group of rugged individualists, non-conformists, people who know how to pull things apart and put them back together, people who don’t like being spoon fed. There’s plenty about Linux and the various desktops and applications in open source that’s easy and fun to use. But real Linux nerds prefer rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty.
One branch of this rugged individualism, so to speak, is running Linux in different environments. Just using Linux in your PC? Ok, that’s pretty good. But how about building a Linux system from scratch? Or on your phone? Even better, how about in your car?
Linux as Car Stereo
Using Linux for other things — not just as a stereo — in your car is possible, of course. You can connect in with the OBD-II (On-Board Diagnostics II) interface to the car’s sensor network. This interface has been required on all cars since 1996 and produces quite a bit of data on the functions of the car.
Sometimes this is called a “carputer.” Though a little dated, mp3car.com has a good “Car Computing 101.” Linux may become the operating system of your car in the near future, but that’s probably out of the hands of hobbyists.
Not for Mere Mortals
First, let’s get the really geeky, really great stuff out of the way. Time Killer is probably the pinnacle. The TITLE tag on his web page says “The Coolest Car in the World.” In this case, I would hardly say that’s hyperbole. Time Killer built the Linux car stereo from scratch, modified his dashboard, and put it all together with a touch screen monitor.
There are some other great Do-It-Yourself sites out there as well.
In reality, the quick answer to “Can I put Linux in my car easily?” would be probably… no. Please prove me wrong! But I’ve been using Linux in my car for years, and I’m pretty much a hardware lightweight. So you know where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Homage to the Empeg
The Empeg was, I believe, the very first mass produced in-dash mp3 car stereo. It was called the Empeg Car, and it was first shipped to customers in 1999. It was a fully functional Linux computer that had a “sled” that was mounted in the single DIN slot in your car, just like a pull-out car stereo. The computer’s main display was set to handle playlists and all sorts of information about your music. The faceplate lens was, by default, the blue color, as pictured here.
Lens kits, which included green, amber, and red lenses, were sold separately. In Silicon Valley, car stereo installation places generally knew of the Riocar and would do the installation. Whether they knew it or not, installing a sled and connecting good speakers and a sub woofer was not advanced work for them.
In November 2000, Empeg was acquired by SONICblue Incorporated, which continued to market an updated version of the car player – the Rio Car - until it was discontinued in January 2002. The total number of existing players in the world is about 4000 players.
It was right about this time that a friend told me he had an extra one, and I could buy it. They were considered really good mp3 players but generally too expensive. Somewhere in the range of $800 - $1200. But because they had been discontinued, the price had dropped. I paid $400.
You can still buy an Empeg Riocar at Amazon and other places. But it is often not available, so you’ll probably need to set an alert and keep checking.
Some Technical Details
Today, there’s a slowly fading but still committed Empeg Riocar owner community. This is Linux after all. The community is the real strength. The version of Linux used in the Empeg Riocar is called Hijack and it is hosted on SourceForge, the famous open source projects repository.
Disk drive size varied depending on the model. All models below 60GB were single-drive models, leaving one of the two bays free for the addition of a second disk drive. A lot of my friends added extra disk drives, though I settled for the 20GB. That is, actually, a lot of space for your music.
The player did not come with a radio tuner. An add-on AM/FM/RDS radio tuner module, that installed inside the dashboard behind the docking sled, was sold separately. One DIN-sized car docking sled with four 4v line-level outputs (stereo front/rear) and two line-level aux inputs (stereo). One AC adapter for using the player indoors. One USB cable for loading songs into the player. Here’s a great summary of the different model specs. And extreme details here.
Finally…
It’s tough if you specifically want to run Linux in your car and are looking for a ready-made product. There is nothing like that being sold currently. But with some digging and some effort, there are Do-It-Yourself projects or discontinued products that still have active support communities. The bragging rights are worth it!
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Giz Explains 3D Technologies
Last week, CNN's attempt to display the future of TV news ended up making 3D look like the gimmick that it is. Yep, 3D is a gimmick, most associated (outside of CNN) with those stupid glasses designed to fit Blockheads from Venus. But as you know, there are many different scientific approaches dedicated to tricking you into thinking bullets—or other deadly projectiles such as children—are popping out of the screen and coming right at you. Here's a quick and dirty guide to 3D magic.
Most 3D operates on a single basic principle—tricking our dumb, binocular brain into interpreting a 2D image into one with depth. The most basic way to do this is stereoscopy, which is essentially showing a slightly different image to each eye which the brain mashes together into a 3D image. We've broken up the million different ways to do 3D in a few broad categories.
Stupid Glasses
It's easiest to do stereoscopic images with glasses or other nerdtastic eyewear to change how you see stuff—hence there are a lot of variations in 3D glasses tech.
• An anaglyph image is the old school 3D we all know and got headaches from: An image has two different color layers, one for each eye, with slightly different perspectives and when we look at them through those awesome plastic glasses (usually with red and blue lenses) that block one layer in each eye, our dumb brain takes the resulting separate image from each eye and mashes them together to make a 3D scene in our head.
• Polarized 3D glasses are the more modern choice for cheap 3D for the masses—you've worn them at IMAX if you've caught a 3D movie there, or at Disney World, since the big thing they allow over an anaglyph is full color. They work kind of the same way as the red/blue glasses though—two synced projectors throw images with slightly different perspectives up simultaneously, but at different polarizations. The polarized glasses only allow a single corresponding polarized image into each eye, and the brain does the hard work again, combining two separate images into a single 3D one.
•The Pulfrich effect is a brain bug where side-to-side motion is interpreted to have some depth when there's a slight sync lag between your eyes. A set of glasses with a dark lens over one eye will make this happen, so when something moves from left to right, it'll look like it's moving back or forward—you know, in 3D. It's been used for the Super Bowl and Married with Children, since the glasses are so cheap. [Thanks David!]
•ChromaDepth is perhaps the fanciest glasses tech using micro-prisms and whatnot (hello red and blue again), but all it essentially does is slightly shift the way colors are perceived in each eye, so they see different things and boom, 3D. The major limitation of the tech is that if you change the color of an object, you also change how its depth is perceived, since it's all based on color. (Check out the video above, done in ChromaDepth, to see what I mean.) [Thanks David!]
• LCD shutter glasses are excellent because they're so ridiculous. They actually block vision alternately in each eye in time with the refresh rate on the display by rapidly darkening each lens, while the display alternately shows images with a slightly different perspective (this is called alternate frame sequencing). It's essentially the "show different stuff to each eye" principle taken to its logically absurd conclusion—literally blocking the sight of the unwanted eye. Yes, these complicated puppies usually run over $100 (or way more, even), and can give you a headache on a monitor without a high enough refresh rate.
No Glasses Required
Okay, so you don't wanna wear glasses. No problem—you just move the one-image-per-eye dance to the display itself.
• A parallax barrier is one of the more popular ways for swinging 3D without glasses—you see it in Sharp TVs for instance. It actually works a lot like polarized glasses, it just moves where the obstruction magic happens to the front of the TV. Instead of having glasses filter the image for each eye, the screen's parallax barrier—think of it is a very finely grated fence with precisely angled holes—directs different light into each eye, and your brain turns the mixed signals into a 3D image. The bad part? With a normal parallax barrier, the screen is permanently in 3D mode and you don't have exactly have a wide viewing angle. Sharp's trick for 3D in LCD displays is fancier—there's a second LCD that creates the parallax barrier with a polarized grid of lines, which is nice because you can turn it off and go back to regular 3D viewing.
• Integral Imaging is a form of parallax actually. You've got a bunch of supertiny micro-images that you actually peep through an array of spherical convex lenses, one per micro-image. All these micro-images come together when you look at them to form a 3D image.
• Another form of parallax is continuous-motion parallax. Here, HoloVizio's system dumps pixels in favor of voxels, which can project multiple light beams in multiple directions simultaneously.
3D in 3D
So far, we've just talked about 2D images on a flat screen, which your brain is fooled into thinking are three-dimensional. The other side is creating images in real 3D— you know, meatspace. Still, most of them make use of lighting and projection tricks too.
• The Graphics Lab at the University of Southern California has come up with a cheap way to create images in 3D space (as opposed to planar space) by using a spinning mirror called a light-field display. Basically high speed video is projected onto a quickly spinning mirror, which then "reflects a different and accurate image to each potential viewer." The system uses an algorithm to figure out the correct shading and occlusion for the image.
• Japanese researchers' new plasma-laser hologrammy device takes advantage of the "plasma emission phenomenon near the focal point of focused laser light." By manipulating the laser's focal point, along the x, y and z axes, they can display real 3D images in mid-air.
• Heliodisplay actually creates a surface in mid-air to project an image onto, which allows you to do the "Help me Obi-wan Kenobi" type of floating holograms that look 3Dish, though they're actually planar (2D) images. Yep, it's expensive.
FAKE FAKE FAKE
There are lots of suggested 3D images out there that aren't any kind of real 3D—videogames are of course the most obvious. But why pick on them when you can pick on CNN?
• Sorry Wolf, but we gotta hit people with the truth: CNN's "holograms" are totally fake. We already explained this before, but no one was projected in front of Wolf Blitzer. He was looking at a wall. What we saw at home as computer-generated: A bunch of HD cameras filmed the hologramee from all sides, computers crunched that data and delivered whatever angle the studio camera needed at the time. As long as the source angle was synced to the studio angle, it looked, to viewers at least, like a 3D "hologram." Nice try, Wolfie. Call us when you score an R2 unit. –With Reporting by Seung Lee. Post updated with two additional 3D technologies.
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