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

[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".