beamjockey: Drawing of Bill of the Heterodyne Boys by Phil Foglio. (Default)
beamjockey ([personal profile] beamjockey) wrote2009-10-22 06:25 pm

Fidgeters from Another Dimension

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.

[identity profile] mmcirvin.livejournal.com 2009-10-23 03:41 am (UTC)(link)
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.)