The making of a 3D video:

Over the last few days, some interesting facts have been learnt regarding making a 3D video.
Let me tell you that creating the 3D effect is an art in itself.


Its not just enough to make a 3D movie by using stereoscopic camera and render it. You need to make sure that the audience feel the effect of 3 dimensional characters and environment.


And thats what was worked upon during the making of the "Anilmation-3D" video. When you watch a video, there are two things that effects your perception of the depth/3D:


1. Far away objects/environment.


2. Close by objects.




Its not as easy as you may think to create a good 3D effect all through the video.


As many of us know, to create a 3D movie, we need 2 cameras capturing the action from slightly different angles/positions.


To make close-by objects have the 3D effect, you need to decrease the coaxial seperation[one of the many attributes of a stereoscopic camera, which simply means the distance between the right camera and the left camera]


so for the close-up shot in the anilmation video where the letter "A" is shown, this distance was kept very low[approx. 0.3 units]


And in the same shot where the camera rotates and focuses on the other letters, the seperation has been increased slowly to a higher value as the main focus would be on farther objects[or letters]


In the case of the following shot where the camera runs through the tunnel, the sepeartion was kept to a much higher value, so that we can feel that the letters are coming closer and going farther. This is a challenge as we need to make sure we dont make a fuzzy video without clarity!


Overall, it does seem to be an exiting feature of Maya 2009 using which we can explore a whole new world of possiblilities in 3D movie making!







With love.. Anil

Microsoft focuses on 3D camera company

Microsoft is reported to be buying 3D digital camera company 3DV Systems for $34m, giving it remote gesture recognition technology.
Israel-based 3DV Systems is a venture capital-backed startup that has raised about $38m from investors. The company was founded in 1996 by two Israeli defence industry scientists who had worked on electro-optics technology for missiles. They developed and patented technology that could work out the depth relationships of objects in a digital camera's field of view, in real time with high resolution. This was embodied in a chipset and in the ZCam 3D camera product range, now available in web-cam format.

The DeepC chipset hardware computes the camera's distance from objects it 'sees' using a time-of-flight principle and its technology is described thus: "The Depth information is captured by emitting pulses of infra-red light to all objects in the scene and sensing the reflected light from the surface of each object. All objects in the scene are then arranged in layers according to the distance information sensed by the D pixels in the camera, providing the Depth information in real time as standard black and white video where the grey-level correlates to relative distance. Colour data is provided using a normal colour imaging sensor."

Real time translates to 60 frames per second and the depth resolution is accurate to 1-2cm. The company thinks its technology is appropriate for "PC-based gaming and for background replacement in web-conferencing." One aspect of it is that there is little use made of the host system's CPU.
3DV states that the ZCam: "provides home users [with] revolutionary gesture recognition capabilities in addition to real-time background replacement, enabling them to control video games and personal space through intuitive body gestures and immerse themselves with virtual reality."
The attraction for Microsoft, with its Xbox 360 games console and Surface gesture recognition system, is immediately obvious. XBox360 game players could control the action by moving their hands in front of the device. This would give Microsoft some kind of answer to Nintendo's Wii.
Microsoft said it: "does not comment on rumors or speculation." No-one was available to answer inquiries at 3DV as the employees are away from the office at a company event until Sunday.

With love..
Anil