Fidgeters from Another Dimension

[beamjockey]

I was thinking about 3-D movies today. Suddenly I recalled that I had seen a batch of photos in the Google Life archive that included one of the most famous of all Life's pictures: patrons in a movie theatre wearing 3-D glasses.

It was shot by the appropriately-named J. R. Eyerman (1906-1985), at the Paramount Theater in Hollywood on 26 November 1952, during a showing of Bwana Devil.

Since there were multiple pictures from the shoot in the collection, I began to wonder whether one could find two of them, shot from slightly different points of vew, that might permit the construction of a 3-D image of the audience itself. Wouldn't that be cool?

Unfortunately, it turned out that there aren't very many images. Some of them are duplicate images printed at different exposures. And Eyerman apparently used a tripod, so the camera doesn't move much with respect to the audience.

Nevertheless, I found a couple of images that allowed me to animate the audience. Here's a quick-and-dirty GIF. It's copyrighted, as always, by Time, Incorporated.


One could do this trick with many of the Life shoots. If one needed a new hobby for some reason.

Comments

one of the earlier Worldcons I went to

[dragonet2.livejournal.com]

don't recall if it was '76, '77 or '78, showed Creature from the Black Lagoon in 3D. I lasted about 30 minutes before the "headache like being hit repeatedly in the head" burst into life. Taking off the red/blue glasses and getting the heck out of the theatre made it fade away.

That said, I've seen 3d movies at the Union Station IMAX. The glasses technology now is wonderful. Went to the first one with a bit of trepidation, but never any discomfort.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking about this picture in connection with the question of what kind of glasses they were actually wearing. I always thought that the glasses with polarizer lenses were an innovation of the 1980s 3D revival, but they weren't. Wikipedia, at least, claims that even during the original boom of the 1950s, most 3D movies used polarizer lenses and colored anaglyph lenses were used mostly for films that only had brief 3D segments.

It makes a certain amount of sense that both schemes would be in use: a polarizer setup requires special projection equipment (which, in its original form, was somewhat fiddly) and a particular type of screen, whereas an anaglyphic film requires no special equipment apart from the glasses, though the experience is inferior. Even today, home video releases of 3D movies generally use some sort of anaglyph scheme whereas theatrical movies use any of multiple polarizer processes.

Anyway, on my LJ I recently referred to this image as depicting an audience wearing anaglyph lenses, but on further reflection I'm not sure it actually is. In posters, book covers, etc. the photo is often slightly colorized: they'll draw in red and green lenses on the glasses to make it look like they're wearing colored anaglyph lenses. But I can't see any brightness differences between the lenses, though that's certainly not conclusive. They might be wearing polarizer lenses. Is it known what movie they were watching?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...And, come to think of it, I actually briefly wore what must have been polarizer glasses in a very different context in the mid-1970s: I was being examined by a pediatric opthamologist prior to surgery for strabismus, and they were trying to see whether I had any stereoscopic depth perception at all. (I did, though I'm convinced mine is still somewhat less functional than most people's.)

I remember putting on some chunky glasses and looking at, of all things, a 3D photo of an enormously magnified fly. What can I say--it was a trippy era. I really should have started squeaking "HELLLP MEEEE".

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Oh, wait, I see you said it was Bwana Devil. Wikipedia says it was generally shown with a polarizer process (and it was in color, which certainly would have worked best that way).

The director was the very same Arch Oboler who was responsible for "Chicken Heart"!

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I thought about putting in an IMDB link for the movie, but was just lazy enough not to.

There are intense 3-D buffs lurking on the Web, so I bet we could find out a lot about Bwana Devil's process from them if we looked.

I have tried anaglyphic glasses, various kinds of polarizers, flickering shutters, the lenticular pseudomoving 3-D of Art^N, and the awesomely kluged revolving color wheel of the Vectrex 3-D Color Visualizer. I have experimented with the Pulfrich Effect, too, though it is impractical to make a movie out if it.

The director was the very same Arch Oboler who was responsible for "Chicken Heart"!

In a production of which, you have actually acted. Spooky.

Perhaps all of our blog postings are interconnected, sooner or later .

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

A while after you posted that, I was disappointed to discover that most modern biologists think Alexis Carrel's immortal chicken cells were nothing but a case of laboratory contamination.

(And that the other famous case of anomalously hardy cells, the encysted bacteria that supposedly lived on the Moon for a couple of years aboard a Surveyor probe, was probably also simple contamination after the fact.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

This person cobbled together a homemade version of the Vectrex imager.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I am filled with admiration. However, I have an original one, and three 3-D game titles.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

As for 3D versions of the picture, these people faked one up in red/blue:

http://www.3dimages.co.uk/gallery/v/3d_faces/3D+Audience.jpg.html

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

See if using some HDRI software will give an interesting effect.

[charlie-meadows.livejournal.com]

One of the viewers appears to be sneezing out the copyright notice...