3D Vision Blog

Microsoft is among the first companies to make 3D commercials, at least in Germany with the release of a 45 second 3D advertisement continuing the line of 2D ads for the promotion of the new Office 2010. Apparently the video was shot with two Arri Alexa 3D cameras as well as two high-speed cameras and it was made to be shown in 3D cinemas in Germany before 3D movies projection starts. If you are interested you can watch the 3D commercial in anaglyph format (the video above), uploaded to YouTube by Microsoft, however they did not upload it in SbS or A/B 3D format with the yt3d tag, but instead already compressed video in anaglyph. So the big question is will this commercial make you get the new Office 2010… ;)

The movie Street Dance 3D is available in UK with anaglyph 3D version, however they’ve mxed up things a bit as reported by Gareth from Stereo3D.co.uk who bought the movie and discovered with a surprise that the video is encoded for red-green anaglyph glasses, but the bundled pair of paper anaglyph glasses is red-cyan. This comes as quite a surprise, considering the fact that the anaglyph glasses are branded for the movie and are packed inside the DVD, so the mistake is not made by the retailer, but most likely is coming from the DVD packaging company that put the glasses for the movie using the wrong color filters. It may come as a surprise to them but not all 3D is equal, and not all anaglyph 3D is the same – there are multiple formats and solutions and you should be very careful not to mix up things like that, because nobody will be happy when the 3D does not work as it is supposed to. And if the 3D does not work because of such mistake and the user is not aware of where the problem comes from, he might as well get bad opinion about the 3D in general… although anaglyph 3D is not the best form of 3D it is still the most widely usable and affordable at least when you match the right color filter for the glasses with the content encoded with the right anaglyph format. This might be just an issue with the UK 3D anaglyph release of the movie, but the problem might as well be bigger, so if you’ve got the movie and have the same problem please do report it here…

The 3D Drawing Pad is intended as a fun product for kids that relies on very simple, but effective idea to get the kids attention and interest in 3D technology and make them want to learn more about it. What you get is a 50 sheets of paper attached to a pad with each sheet having a red-cyan background image printed and a pair of red-cyan paper anaglyph glasses. Then when you write or draw something over the paper with a black pen it looks like a normal note on a paper, but when you put on the anaglyph glasses the text you’ve written seems to pop-out of the paper. The reason for that is that the printed red-cyan background on each sheet of the pad when viewed with the glasses seem to go inside of the paper and the text seems to stick out from it. As I’ve aid pretty simple concept, but making it interesting enough for smaller kids and you can use the 3D Drawing Pad as a means to get their attention to 3D and how everything works…

- The 3D Drawing Pad is currently available at Amazon for $6.95 USD…