Results tagged “failure” from Swell 3D

Editorial control can be a lot of work (believe me, I know), but the lack of it can kill an otherwise promising website.

3D Screen is a sort of public bulletin board of 3-D anaglyph images, sorted into categories including Movies, People, Sci-Fi, Flowers, Sports, and the most popular section, Misc. It is worth taking a look, but probably not worth a return visit. I'm afraid the site is not well put together, and not edited at all. There are 222 pictures there, which is a respectable size for an online gallery, but they are a mixed bag: some are good, some are mundane, some are awful. Little or no information is ever given about the artwork, or the artists, not even their names. New uploads seem to be very infrequent, about one a month.

I spotted quite a few stolen images, so of course I suspect there are many more that I didn't spot. For example, this microscopic photo of calcite crystals was ripped off from the Structure Probe Inc. catalogue, with no attribution whatsoever. This sort of theft is common to bulletin board websites, and the administrators seldom have the inclination or the resources to police it, causing the whole gallery to be tainted with doubt as to whether any of the content can be trusted.

There are mechanisms in place to rate and comment on the works, but there is no good reason to do so, when the artist himself has not commented on it, nor given his name or any other profile information, and may not ever come back to read your commentary, and may not even be the real artist at all.

Unsafe content warning: One section is labeled "Adult," where the images are pornographic. It was a commendable impulse by the site developer, to have such content filed in its own category, where people who don't want to see such pictures (or are not allowed to see them where they are) can avoid them by not viewing that category. But then, they go and ruin it by having random thumbnail images at the top of every page. The random images are pulled from all the categories, including the "Adult," so you are liable to get porn at the top of any page you look at! This regrettable scripting mistake makes it an unsafe website, rather than a safe website with an unsafe section.

Not every experiment is a success; some fail. But if we learn why they failed, the failures are in a sense successful.

For some reason, I thought maybe I could compose a good 3-D anaglyph using screenshots from the terrific strategy game Age of Mythology. I was wrong.

As you can see, the results were... not particularly good.

The main problem is, AOM renders everything isometrically, so moving to the left and right doesn't really give you different views of the world. But it does let you rotate your view. I thought I could simulate left and right views by slightly rotating the map. It didn't work well. After a while, I gave up and branded the effort FAIL.

Here are the full screen shots I used, if you want to see what I had to work with:
aom_heroes_left.png
aom_heroes_right.png
aom_villagers_left.png
aom_villagers_right.png

And this is a bit of a tangential question, but... am I the only one who thinks the Egyptian villager women are pretty hot?