Results tagged “history” from Swell 3D

Stereo pictures are not just for fun and entertainment, they are also for documenting history. At least since 1865, the horror and destruction of war have been recorded in 3-D photographs. Now, we may see the devastation of the September 11 attack in 3-D aerial photos.

On Sept. 16, 2001, CNN posted video of a helicopter view of New York City, still smoldering from the deadly attack on the World Trade Center five days earlier. Photographer David Friedman made sixteen 3-D anaglyph images from CNN's video footage. The images are very small; their size was limited by the dimensions of CNN's streaming video. But even at this size, they are haunting images of evil, and the 3-D makes them all the more real.

As the anniversary of the 9/11 attack once again approaches, please remember the victims, and pray for our country.

The Italian Stereoscopic Archive hosts these rare 3-D photos of advancing Nazi armies, converted to red/cyan anaglyphs from stereographs originally published in two German books. The first book, The Fuhrer's Soldiers in the Field, documents the invasion of Poland in 1939. The second, The Fight in the West, follows the infantry into Belgium and France in 1940.

Wherever Hitler sent his soldiers to capture countries, he also sent his photographers to capture the images. The photos were published in Germany, as propaganda to show off the Nazis as conquering heroes, and their enemies as mongrel weaklings.

These photos are the work of skilled craftsmen. As with other German achievements of this period -- in architecture, just for instance, or rocketry -- one may admire the craftsmanship while deploring the evil use to which it was put. If you could forget that they're Nazis, you could think the pictures are beautiful. But you can't.

On June 21, 1838, Charles Wheatstone, the inventor of 3D anaglyphs, read his treatise, "On Some Remarkable, and Hitherto Unobserved, Phenomena of Binocular Vision," to the Royal Society of London. The article was accompanied by 11 simple line drawings, to demonstrate the new science of "stereoscopy." They were the first 3D anaglyphs ever published.

I have precisely redrawn Wheatstone's original 11 stereoscope figures -- labeled "Fig. 10" through "Fig. 20" just as in the original source -- showing them as red/cyan anaglyphs. Figures 10 through 16 also have Wheatstone's descriptions (he didn't describe figures 17 through 20).

With one exception (Fig. 20), the drawings are minimally simple, no more than doodles of circles, lines and squares. Wheatstone deliberately avoiding shading or color, "...for had either shading or colouring been introduced it might be supposed that the effect was wholly or in part due to these circumstances, whereas by leaving them out of consideration no room is left to doubt that the entire effect of relief is owing to the simultaneous perception of the two monocular projections, one on each retina."

On June 21, 1838, Charles Wheatstone showed an amazing picture to the Royal Society of London, a picture which advanced the science of optics and helped to usher in the modern age. That picture looked like this:

And there were more pictures just like it. Wheatstone had drawn a batch of 11 simple drawings. Each one was a pair of doodles, the right one not quite identical to the left one. These doodles were designed to be inserted into a contraption which Wheatstone called his "stereoscope."

The stereoscope displayed one doodle to one eye, and the other doodle to the other eye. Nowadays, we achieve the same effect with anaglyph 3D glasses. Here is what amazed the scientists in 1838:

Wheatstone's treatise, published in volume 128 of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, explained his research into this hitherto unknown property of optics. It is almost unbelievable that such an apparently self-evident truth was unknown until 1838, but there is in fact no record of anyone having made this discovery before.

You can buy a PDF of Wheatstone's 1838 article from Royal Society Publishing. But they want $49.00 for it! For one 170-year-old article, can you believe it? I bet they're not selling like hotcakes.

The complete text is available free online at the Stereoscopy.com Library, too.

Best of all, I have redrawn all 11 of Wheatstone's anaglyph examples for red/blue 3D glasses. Check them out.