Long time no nothing

A lot has happened since the last post! Among other things, there's a lot of free photogrammetry software available now, and I just found a great guide at the blog of Professor Peter Falkingham, "a Lecturer in Vertebrate Biology at Liverpool John Moores University, UK."

He has posted some nice reviews and how-tos about free photogrammetry software, for example: Free photogrammetry software review: 2017 posted this past December.

I plan to install a few and give them a whirl since It would be nice to find an open source lens and camera calibration solution that exports nicely to Maya or Blender. SFM is a big feature of most of these packages, but of course I'm more a stickler for low error camera calibration.

Real 3D W1: Fun!

I've been having fun with the Real 3D-W1 after getting Parallels working again under Snow Leopard, running StereoPhoto Maker ("SPM") under XP to read and process the .mpo files.

I'm slowly working on my own pairing pipeline, with keystoning for proper toe-in instead of horizontal offsetting... might be possible with SPM but I've just started to explore its features.

The big questions now are:
1) How to reproduce the 3D effect? Lenticular prints from FujiFilm for $7 are expensive, and I can't find a web site. Just ordered red/cyan anaglyph glasses and "Skweez-Vue:" viewers from the3dmarket.com to get started.
2) What to call this camera?! "W1" leads the pack; "Fujifilm Real 3D W1" is a ridiculous product name (and demonstrates why Apple is taking over the world).

Fujifilm FinePix "REAL 3D W1" is For Real

	→
Prototype		Production model

It looks like the Fujifilm 3D camera is arriving at Japanese vendors (!!!) and has evolved nicely from the boxy prototype shown a year ago.

The manual shows interesting features for adjusting parallax and for taking non-stereo twin-lens shots.

Why I Trust Numbers, Not My Eyes

Confirmed-- spiral "blue" and "green" are both (254, 151, 255). Wow.

Looking In, Looking Out:No OCO, but Kepler Made It

As investigators search for the cause of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory's launch "mishap", the successful launch of the Kepler spacecraft provided some relief for those of us giddy about humanity's ever-expanding observation of the big picture "here" and our hopes for what we may find "out there."

Imaging an Image in the Mind

Via Slashdot and BoingBoing, researchers in Osaka, Japan claim a method of detecting images directly from a person's mind, published today in the the journal Neuron.:

Perceptual experience consists of an enormous number of possible states. Previous fMRI studies have predicted a perceptual state by classifying brain activity into prespecified categories. Constraint-free visual image reconstruction is more challenging, as it is impractical to specify brain activity for all possible images. In this study, we reconstructed visual images by combining local image bases of multiple scales, whose contrasts were independently decoded from fMRI activity by automatically selecting relevant voxels and exploiting their correlated patterns.

Binary-contrast, 10 x 10-patch images (2^100 possible states) were accurately reconstructed without any image prior on a single trial or volume basis by measuring brain activity only for several hundred random images. Reconstruction was also used to identify the presented image among millions of candidates. The results suggest that our approach provides an effective means to read out complex perceptual states from brain activity while discovering information representation in multivoxel patterns.

Variations on a Theme

My favorite Andre the Giant variation is still the "Andy van Dam has a posse" design that made it onto Onyxes at SIGGRAPH '94-- wish I'd taken pictures. It's been thrilling to watch Shepard Fairey's "Hope" poster become the iconic print image of this campaign, with "Hope" variations/sendups/ripoffs/etc. flowing from artists everywhere since it popped in January. The sweet story came full circle today when Fairey posted how excited he was to see Mad Magazine render Alfred E. Neuman in a "HOPELESS" homage. Rene Wanner assembled 84 variations, the bulk of them rude rather than clever, all linked to more info. My favorites (after Alfred E. Neuman) are Winnie and Luke. (via boingboing)

FinePix Real 3D System?!

No product yet, but Fujifilm has announced development of the FinePix Real 3D System, to include the new "Fujifilm Super CCD EXR" sensor, " not related to OpenEXR, but we can dream...

PHOTOKINA 2008, COLOGNE, GERMANY, September 23, 2008 FUJIFILM Corporation today announces a radical departure from current imaging systems with the development of a completely new, real image system (3D digital camera, 3D digital photo frame, 3D print) that marks a complete break from previous attempts to introduce this technology.

More at DPReview...

35mm Lens Adapters for HD

Just heard about a fascinating type of lens adapter for shooting through 35mm prime/zoom lenses on HD cameras-- project the image through the 35mm lens onto (moving!) ground glass, then shoot the resulting image with the HD camera through its optics dialed to macro. It's an "analog hole" approach that BW says works great. Manufacturers:

• Letus
• Redrock Micro
• Cinevate Brevis MP.1

Attention and Awareness in Stage Magic: Turning Tricks Into Research

Amazing study in Nature Reviews Neuroscience on mechanisms of "magic"-- ways that our perceptions fail and allow us to believe in types of conjuring effects:

• Appearance
• Vanish
• Transposition
• Restoration
• Penetration
• Transformation
• Extraordinary feats
• Telekinesis
• Extrasensory perception

Phoenix Has Landed

I love it when a plan comes together...:)

JAIMIE WARREN

Stumbled onto Jaimie Warren photography and... digging it.

I'm sick of the disposability of things. There's the waste problem, the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses problem, and the fact that stuff is going to break down.

Why must every previous device be made obsolete with every new development? Why can't we value machines over lifetimes-- multiple generations-- as opposed to a few years or until the next one comes out?

I want to see a "chassis" approach to electronics-- replacing or repairing only components or subsystems to get new functionality.

The iPod Deb gave me is a good example of this-- worthless to her, a solid chassis with a bum battery and probably hard drive too. With a 8 or 16GB CF chip, a new battery, and bluetooth, it could keep going for decades.

Jim Woodring invented the Looty to look into his own eyes. Nachimir threw together an Instructable on it-- must try this out ASAP...

Seb Przd is blowing my mind! He's doing a lot with panoramas, HDR, and reprojection-- lovely collections.

The blue LED's are invading my life. I hate them.

It would be difficult to replace blue LED's with "regular" (read: red, green, yellow, or white) ones-- for surface-mount LED's and RGB ones, I'd more likely damage the circuit board... though outright removing one would be almost as good as replacing one, with the added spiteful element of having gouged its eye out for irritating mine...

Blue LED's are alienating to many people, especially those over a certain age; they seem alien and "wrong" somehow, and it's not a result of growing up with LED's of colors other than blue, but the fact that we simply do not see blue glowing things in nature. Red, yellow, orange and white are colors we know from fire and the stars-- light sources in nature-- and these have been the colors of electronic light elements until a few years ago.

We should have learned in chemistry lab to fear blue flames since they're so hard to see, and blue-lit electronics are successors to customized cars' blue neon undercarriage lighting. These are menacing associations for me, and they also evoke cheapness and cheesy after-market design.

The blue LED has invaded consumer-level electronics and is starting to make it into higher-end electronics as well, and I think it will have an overall cheapening effect on the brand images of those companies who choose to use them. It's a high-tech artifact motif like the raw polygon and aliased pixel, and I hope it will go away after we get over its novelty.

"The Military Industrial Light and Magic Complex: Avoiding Ender’s Folly"?

Just heard about this "little planets" method for inverting panoramas into a stereographic projection, which is not what I'd expect it to be called. Of course there's a stereographic projection Flickr group-- very cool to browse.

Seems like all you need to do is:

• Shoot and stitch a complete spherical panorama to get an image with an aspect ratio of 2,
• Rotate the image 180 degrees,
• Stretch the image so it's square (aspect ratio 1),
• Run Filters > Distort > Polar Coordinates..., with the "Rectangular to Polar" option.

Homemade cheapo bellows for tilt-shift photography (sort of).

old American Cinematographer article on Stanley Kubrick's use of a special 50mm f/0.7 lens used on Barry Lyndon.

Blueprint paper photography?! Turns out blueprint paper develops with a little ammonia...

Found a good page at Cornell on the ISO 12233 Test Chart, along with links to two companies-- Sine Patterns and Precision Optical Instruments-- who sell test patterns in different sizes and formats.

Thinking of places to stop on my trip re: art, architectural, and photographic history. Louis Daguerre was French... where was that window where he took that picture? No, it was Joseph-Nicephore Niepce, out his studio window.

The Wikipedia Photography Timeline is pretty cool.

Google Street View has nice display and interaction of registered panoramic images. They were taken by Immersive Media and by Google using their own custom camera rig. You can tell which by figuring out the camera heght-- the van's pov is much higher. Interesting Boing Boing coverage covers a few issues, but the big qustion for everybody is:

Is this creepy or not, and why?

>>>

PanoramaScanCam (?!)-- Mac A. Cody is working on converting a Umax flatbed scanner to a panoramic camera. When I read the proposal and saw the first sketches a few weeks ago, I thought he would never get there-- there's a lot of work involved-- but here it is! He achieved first light, and the image looks promising. I am most impressed by his (re/ab)use of a toilet tank hose clip in the registration sensor assembly.

Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904), Photographer of Fluids exhibit (2004/2005) at Musée d'Orsay.

Scientists at the U.S. DOE Ames Laboratory have developed a silver-based, mesh-like material with a negative index of refraction:

Metamaterials, also known as left-handed materials, are exotic, artificially created materials that provide optical properties not found in natural materials. Natural materials refract light, or electromagnetic radiation, to the right of the incident beam at different angles and speeds. However, metamaterials make it possible to refract light to the left, or at a negative angle. This backward-bending characteristic provides scientists the ability to control light similar to the way they use semiconductors to control electricity, which opens a wide range of potential applications.

Michael Bach's blog of Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena has quite a few: