3D Vision Blog

While not quite the 3D Vision Live type of community for sharing 3D photos, the website 3D Porch made by Phil Dhingra offers simple and easy way for you to upload and share your 3D photos in different formats. It does not support direct viewing with 3D Vision, but you can download the photos in Side by Side or MPO format and then view them on your computer. You can also use the website as an online service to convert 3D photos from JPS to MPO format and vice versa if you don’t have an offline tool to do that at the moment. Other than that the website is primarily targeted at viewing 3D photos in anaglyph format, but as I’ve already said downloading them and opening them locally is also an easy option…

You need to upload a photo in JPS (Side by Side JPEG) or MPO file format and the author has tested the functionality with Fujifilm FinePix Real 3D W3, W1, and Sony DSC-TX9. He asks visitors to help with confirming the compatibility with other 3D cameras, so you are welcome to try and report back to him if it is working or not. He is looking especially for someone with a Nintendo 3DS to test the MPO files generated from the console when taking 3D photos with it, so this is a call to anyone in Japan who already has purchased the console. I’ve already tried the website with a sample photo taken with the Aiptek I2 camera, but due to the fact that this particular camera record photos in a squashed format (half horizontal size) they are not compatible for the moment.

The MPO Toolbox is a suite of four small applications solving various issues for owners of the stereoscopic 3D consumer digital camera Fujifilm FinePix REAL 3D W1. The author of the program is Jérôme Leens, Researcher at Université de Liège (ULg) who is distributing it for free. The MPO Toolbox is currently in its first version and is intended to be used under any version of the Microsoft Windows operating system (32 or 64 bit). The software package contains a few very simple to use tools that will help you manage the MPO (Multi-Picture Object) stereo 3D pictures you get when shooting with the Fujifilm 3D camera…

The MPO Toolbox contains four programs that are quite easy to use, you just need to drag and drop a MPO file over the certain tool to get it perform its action. The tool MPO2JPEGS converts one or more MPO files into pairs of left and right JPEG files and MPO2JPS creates single JPS file with the left and right frames in a Side by Side format. The MPO2ANAGLYPH creates anaglyph red-cyan images and the MPO2DUBOIS is an alternative that creates different anaglyph images from MPO with the colors of the original picture being modified in order to reduce the brightness difference between left and right images for the red objects that are difficult to perceive in 3D with the standard anaglyph method.

- To download the free MPO Toolbox by Stereoscopy News…

The updated version of the free Stereoscopic 3D player includes a lot of fixes, some improved and new features and the new version 1.5.2 of the player seems to be working quite well, so you should download and install it if you have 3D Vision available.

Here is complete list of what is new:
- Added support for still image files (mpo, jpg/jps, tif, gif, png/pns, bmp).
- Added folder browsing (next image/previous image commands) for stills.
- Added folder playback (plays all stills in a folder).
- Added prefetching for folder browsing.
- Added reading parallax from MPO files.
- Added support for still images in playlists.
- Added Shirt+A..Z hotkeys to directly jump to playlist items beyond 35.
- Added call stack to error log file.
- Added low resolution rendering if image resolution exceeds maximum texture size.
- Fixed incompatibilities of HDV capture devices with certain MPEG-2 decoders.
- Fixed deadlock when switching to fullscreen mode while paused.

And now comes the big question that some people have been asking today, regarding the news about the Blu-ray Disc Association announcing the final Blu-ray 3D Specs – will the 3D Vision Video Player support the new format? Unfortunately there is no such support being announced for the free player, but there are already some partners of Nvidia that have announced support for Blu-ray 3D in their future commercial video player solutions. These are Arcsoft with TotalMedia Theatre, Corel with WinDVD, Cyberlink with PowerDVD Ultra and Sonic with Roxio CinePlayer BD and all these players should have GPU-accelerated hardware decoding of the Multiview Video Coding (MVC) codec and support 3D Vision on compatible Nvidia-based video cards. But it is still to early for Blu-ray 3D movies and players at the moment, we’ll probably have to wait at least a few more months before things actually start moving, in the meantime what you can do is update the 3D Vision player…

- Download 3D Vision Video Player v1.5.2 (Windows 7/Vista, 32/64-bit)