Vision III brings 3D to a 2D screen (sort of)

Vision III appears to have just joined the ranks of those giving us innovative and technological breakthroughs. In essence their parallax scanning technology embeds, into a recorded video, some of the depth cues that your brain normally gets from a three dimensional scene. It's really incredibly cool. Subtle, but there.

The Vision III website ( www.inv3.com ) has some technical descriptions and sample clips which explain and demonstrate the effect. A few good HD examples are Tea Party, Boat House, and George Mason Women's Basketball. The parallax scanning technology seems best suited to shots with a moving camera, because when the camera becomes still you can see the parallax shift on the closer foreground objects. Continuous camera movement seems to disguise the shifting effect.

Take a look at the Boat House clip and you'll notice a couple places, like the chain link fence, where the objects closest to the camera seem to jitter or constantly move in a rotating pattern. If you look carefully you'll notice that it's not the entire frame that is being shaken, but instead it's the foreground objects which seem to have a more exaggerated movement compared to the background objects. The shaking effect is the actually a result of the lens angle being adjusted slightly to simulate the angle difference from one eye to the other. In effect the technology is keeping the camera focused on a single horizon point while moving the view to a different angle. The final result is that images seem to be a little bit more vivid or have just a little bit more POP in comparison to normal video.

It's simply amazing to me that the human brain is able to use that parallax shift on the 2D view of your television screen and extract the extra 3D information about a scene. It even seems to work with a single eyeball. I wonder if one day we will see optical enhancements for people with depth perception impairment.