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]

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...