3D Basics
Section 1 - INFORMATION STAGE
Brief History
In 1584, a successful Italian painter wrote;
"A painting, though conducted with the greatest art, and finished to the last perfection, both with regard to its contours, its lights, its shadows, and its colors, can never show a relief equal to that of the natural objects unless these be viewed at a distance and with a single eye."
-Trattata della Pictura, Sculptura
Mr. Leonardo da Vinci, though widely respected for his conceptual and artistic contributions to vision sense understanding, as a master painter was referring to what was heretofore a 2 Dimensional Media form. To their credit, Mr. da Vinci and the other painters of the Renaissance period were the first to recognize the merits of monocular depth cues in their works and for the first time in art history a sense of the third dimension began to emerge in visual media. Their rules with regard to rectilinear perspective changed both the art world of the time and began peoples quest to see in their art the full scope of our visual ability.
Stereopsis (aka Horizontal Disparity, Retinal Disparity or Binocular Disparity)
Stereopsis or "Depth Sense" was formally discovered by Sir Charles Wheatstone, a British Scientist in the early 19th Century. (He also invented the English Concertina, Playfair Cipher (an encryption technique), and made improvements to the "The Wheatstone Bridge", a method of measuring an unknown electrical resistance. All concepts were very advanced for their time.
Read the entire Wheatstone paper >>>
Stereoscopic concepts are the base of a more sophisticated technique called stereophotogammetry, a major component of cartography, architecture, manufacturing, police investigation, astrology, archaeology, meteorology, military applications and many facets of engineering.
Two points of reference with respect to any subject are the key to depth perception and the brain's ability to process those two points of reference back into a single albeit central image> This is what Stereopsis or Depth Sense is all about.
The first paper on the subject of Stereophotography was published in the late 1830‘s, at almost the same time that Sir John Herschel first coined the term "Photography" in 1839, (derived from the Greek words for Light and Writing), and a scant decade after the first successful photographic image was produced in June/July of 1827 by Niepce, using material that hardened on exposure to light and using an exposure time of 8 hours. Niepce later teamed up with Louis Daguerre ( Niepce died 4 years later). Daguerre continued to experiment and soon discovered a way of developing photographic plates and cutting the exposure time from 8 hours down to 30 minutes. He also found that the images could be made permanent by immersing them in salt.
All this illustrates that interest in 3-D imaging, though conceptually introduced by the Renaissance artists of the late 16th century, technically has been around as long as the photographic process itself.
At the London exhibition of 1851, Queen Victoria, amused by various stereo views was later presented with a stereoscope of her own. Media of the time took hold of this and much ado was made, causing half a million of the devices to be sold in the next five years.
By the mid 1850's parlor Stereoscopes had emerged as a popular element of entertainment and education among the wealthy classes throughout the world.
Concepts of Binocular vision seem very obvious now in hindsight, but before Wheatstone, there was no clear written understanding that two slightly dissimilar left and right images could be combined by the brain to form a single image with a new depth sense, or 3rd Dimension. This forms the concept of 3D Stereocinematography.