Hubble In Anaglyph Stereo 3D

rwllama writes "We at the Hubble Space Telescope have quietly released our first anaglyph (i.e. red/cyan) stereo 3D movie of a flight into a Hubble image. This work is a follow-on to the sequences we produced for the 'Hubble 3D' Imax film. Note that the 3D interpretation uses lots of artistic license, so it is not intended to be scientifically accurate. We would love to hear the Slashdot crowd's feedback on whether you want more, are artistic interpretations of scientific data acceptable, is anaglyph 3D too annoying, how many could watch this with a real 3D (e.g., NVIDIA 3D Vision) setup, etc?"

Color Blind

[Lord Byron II]

From TFA:

"Q: I am color blind. Can I see the stereo 3-D movies?

A: Unfortunately, no. The anaglyph stereo 3-D technique relies on colors to separate the left and right eye images. If one can not see or distinguish between certain colors, then the anaglyph stereo 3-D effect will not work."

That's incorrect. The color of the image and the color of the lens is used to direct a false colored monochrome image to each eye. That is, the left eye receives a blue tinted monochrome image and the right eye receives a red tinted monochrome image (or vice-versa).

For someone who is color blind and can't differentiate red and blue, then they will perceive the color arriving at each eye to be the same. For them, the 3D effect will be even better.

Re:Youtube it please

[rwllama]

The 2D version of the movie is available as well: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2010/29/video/a/ [hubblesite.org]

Re:Color Blind

[camperdave]

It depends on the type of color blindness. The red and cyan filters produce a black and red, and a black and cyan image respectively. If you can't distinguish reds, then the left eye receives a field of black. You'd get as much 3D as a person with a patch over their eye: None.

Re:Not annoying at all

[rwllama]

The visualization does uses separate left and right cameras. However, I forgot to mention in the posting that the "3D" is mostly "2.5D". We have no information about what the backside of the nebula looks like, so we could only do full 3D modeling if we artistically created volumes and pixels that Hubble does not observe. We did some of that for the "Hubble 3D" film, but did not invest such time on this project. We did sculpt the front side of the clouds in the nebula into landscapes, but the camera path stays mostly in front, so the sculpting is not that obvious. We are testing to see how much effort is required to get "enough" immersion.

Re:Color Blind

[clone53421]

If you can’t see reds, then the left eye receives a field of (apparently) black. If you can’t distinguish reds (from greens, i.e. red/green colorblindness), the left eye receives what could (apparently) be either red or green, but it should at least be able to see it.

Re:Color Blind

[sirrunsalot]

I'm guessing here - but I'm sure someone could do some calculations to back me up... I don't think that would work. To get a decent stereo effect the two lenses would have to be some distance apart.

If they're two AU's apart and you look in the right direction, then you have a the idea of a parsec [wikipedia.org].

If someone will do the calculations? Okay, I'll bite.

I'll put this in terms of human vision since we're all familiar with that (probably). If your eyes are 2.5 inches apart, then a parallax of an arc second corresponds to an object about 6.5 km away. The Carina nebula is in the neighborhood of 8000 ly away, which is around 2500 pc. Since everything's a nice small angle, that means this nebula is to Earth's orbit what an object 6.5*2500 = 16250 km away is to your eyes. That's about a third of the way to geosynchronous orbit. 80% of people can distinguish depth of objects with a horizontal disparity of about 30 arc seconds. This is about 30*2500 = 75000 times beyond the limits of human depth perception. (I think I'm off by a factor of two here for angles vs. half-angles, but you get the idea.) Even if it's possible to distinguish an approximate depth to an astronomical object using parallax, there's really no chance of distinguishing depth within the object.

Re:Color Blind

[Hillbert]

The red-green test (binocular balancing) does work on anomalous trichromats, i.e. most of the people who are colourblind or colour deficient. Just because you can't distinguish between red and green doesn't change the way the wavelengths focus. (We have to adjust our questions to refer to the right or left side, rather than the red or green, but that's about it.)
Very few people are missing a particular colour of cones; rather, the light-sensitive pigment is altered by genetics to be most sensitive to a different/"wrong" wavelength. So your red-green colour deficient people usually have their 'green' cones more sensitive to red instead of green (or vice versa). That doesn't mean that they don't see green, they're just less sensitive to it than they are to red; the photopigments are still activated by wavelengths other than the one they're most sensitive to.
For more info, look up the spectral sensitivity functions for the various photopigments; you can imagine how shifting the sensitivity of any of the curves will affect things, but it will in no way prevent normal colours from being visible.
(I'm an optometrist. And yes, it's spelled "colour" here.)