Lets Put the National Reconnaissance Office in Charge of Film Production

Rewritten on 5/1/2025 to tone down my real feelings.

Although Hollywood is awash with so-called 3D films, more properly called stereoscopic, there are many of us who doubt their commitment to the medium. Hard to believe, I know, that Hollywood would not be completely sincere but the reality is that many producers are primarily motivated by the business considerations.  

Whether this lack of artistic intent is true in general in studio executives, it is certainly true in the case of stereoscopic films. This stereo "fad", which has lasted longer than I would have guessed, is based on two motivations: an effort to do something that will bring people into the theatre and as part of a larger play with consumer electronics manufacturers to help them sell new televisions to consumers. Beyond that they don't really care.

In addition, stereo projection was enabled by an artifact of digital projection, so it cost the exhibitors very little to be able to reliably project stereo movies. "Very little" is a lot to exhibitors, generally speaking, so there may have been some cost sharing between studios and exhibitors. In other words, studios could hedge their bets by making a stereo version of the film and not have to outlay a lot of money to do so, and in return are covered if stereo exhibition or television becomes very popular.

A tiny percentage of filmmakers actually care about stereoscopic and work to explore what it means to filmmaking and the rest just accommodate the requirement as part of the deal they had to make with the studio to get the project financed. Their sincere cynicism combined with the studio's unwillingness to extend shooting days to allow for the complications of stereo during principal photography is why the filmmakers choose to "add" stereo in the post-production process with the "dimensionalization" techniques. What is interesting about these post-production stereographic techniques is not that they work well, but that they work at all.

The dreary prospect about the lack of passion is the danger of the self-fulfilling prophecy: the filmmakers and studios do not care and the films thus produced are lackluster at best in the area of stereo and the audience senses this and gets bored. And one more time, an opportunity to create a vibrant stereo cinema art form is lost as it has been lost before.

What then can the believer in stereoscopic cinema do to avert this mediocre result? Is there a way forward that will encourage excellence? I think that there is and that the answer is to put someone in charge who believes in stereoscopic, who genuinely cares, and has a proven track record of demanding excellence in this area.  I know of only one such organization: the National Reconnaissance Office.

Notice that the NRO logo image is in the 2.35 widescreen aspect ratio.  This shows that they are already aware of filmmaking conventions.

The NRO is one of the famous secret three-letter agencies of our country's intelligence community. It was and is the one with contract authority to build and launch the satellites and broker the result to the various other agencies and departments such as the CIA, the Dept of the Air Force, and so forth. For decades it has had the largest budget of any three letter agency because the satellites are so damn expensive. Although cloaked in secrecy, the NRO recently declassified their history, or part of it, in "A History of Satellite Reconnaissance" which can be found on their website here.

I think these NRO mission badges are hilarious.

A careful reading of this document will show that various groups inside the NRO have shown a passionate commitment to stereo in various satellite projects as well as an excellent track record for sponsoring the creation of new cameras for reconnaissance, 70mm, counter-balanced, and with other exotic attributes, as well as new and better high resolution film in collaboration with Kodak. They have a proven track record for managing large complicated projects and yet holding firm to what is important. They have integrity and vision.

A stereo project that was managed by the NRO would not be able to get by with shallow and uninteresting post-filmmaking stereoscopy tacked on at the end. No, they would insist on stereo being designed in from the beginning with principal photography being shot in stereo.

Lets end this mediocre effort by the traditional studios who neither understand nor care and put the NRO in charge of all feature film production in Hollywood and get some decent stereo films for a change.

I call upon all the stereoscopic partisans of the world to rise up and write your congressman or whatever the international equivalent may be and demand that the NRO be given this new assignment.  The stereoscopic cinema has been given another chance, lets not throw it away this time.

Visit the NRO on the Internet at www.nro.gov.

One Day My Autostereo Will Come

Autostereo is the odd term for being able to see stereo without glasses. It may sound like the sound system for your car, but its not.  Lenticular images are an example of one form of autostereo.

I first became aware of how practical autostereo was at Ken Perlin's lab in 2000. There I learned the following things as we wrangled the demo for his autostereo paper to SIGGRAPH that year, some of them are technical and some are "industrial".    The point of this is that the technical issues are dwarfed by the industrial issues.

Is this the future of autostereo?

Here are two obvious technical issues followed by two, much harder issues involving commerce.

1. Most autostereo does not pay attention to where the observer is, and has just built into it a number of views that are visible from different angles. Alternatively, you can track where the user's head is in 3D and regenerate the two views that are necessary for that observer in that location which is what we were doing. But then you discover that most head and eye tracking algorithms are 2D not 3D. So reliable 3D head tracking became one of the hardest parts of the problem.

2. But if you are doing more than a store window display, then you will need to be able to generate 3D images from whatever the user sees, whether that be text, the OS window system, or some exciting 3D database of a giant robot. That requires good integration into a high performance (or a suitable performance) graphics device. This of course is very possible today, even on a handheld device (up to a point).

3. But then you discover that there are in fact very few manufacturers of the displays that go into devices. In fact, there are, or were, exactly 1 manufacturer left of CRTs and 4 manufacturers of LCDs and all the people who sell displays buy from these 5 manufacturers. And you discover that they can not just whip out 5 or 50 of something special, that is hideously expensive. And building a new factory is not less than billions of dollars, many billions.

4. On top of that you discover that the primary industrial uses of stereo in industry, are actually quite pleased with the quality and price of their LCD goggles. So that undercuts any productization you might consider that does not go to the consumer.

The point is that everytime you see a press release of a new cool technology or display, you should realize that almost exactly zero of these will reach the consumer. That is a little negative, but it has to do with the costs and risks of ramping up to the scale that would make it worthwhile in that very competitive market.

So we take all announcements of new technology displays, say with 6 phosphors instead of 3, or new autostereo with the grim realization that the probability that any of these becoming available at prices that anyone but the DOD can afford is nearly zero.

On that positive note, HP has announced what seems like a very cool way to autostereo on a handheld. It was just published in Nature.

You can read about it here.

https://socialreader.com/me/channels/78427/content/Sp2UM?_p=article_related[3]

A Wikipedia article on general autostereo is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereoscopy

The citation at Nature is at:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v495/n7441/full/nature11972.html

A multi-directional backlight for a wide-angle, glasses-free three-dimensional display

David Fattal,
Zhen Peng,
Tho Tran,
Sonny Vo,
Marco Fiorentino,
Jim Brug
Raymond G. Beausoleil

Multiview three-dimensional (3D) displays can project the correct perspectives of a 3D image in many spatial directions simultaneously1, 2, 3, 4. They provide a 3D stereoscopic experience to many viewers at the same time with full motion parallax and do not require special glasses or eye tracking. None of the leading multiview 3D solutions is particularly well suited to mobile devices (watches, mobile phones or tablets), which require the combination of a thin, portable form factor, a high spatial resolution and a wide full-parallax view zone (for short viewing distance from potentially steep angles). Here we introduce a multi-directional diffractive backlight technology that permits the rendering of high-resolution, full-parallax 3D images in a very wide view zone (up to 180 degrees in principle) at an observation distance of up to a metre. The key to our design is a guided-wave illumination technique based on light-emitting diodes that produces wide-angle multiview images in colour from a thin planar transparent lightguide. Pixels associated with different views or colours are spatially multiplexed and can be independently addressed and modulated at video rate using an external shutter plane. To illustrate the capabilities of this technology, we use simple ink masks or a high-resolution commercial liquid-crystal display unit to demonstrate passive and active (30 frames per second) modulation of a 64-view backlight, producing 3D images with a spatial resolution of 88 pixels per inch and full-motion parallax in an unprecedented view zone of 90 degrees. We also present several transparent hand-held prototypes showing animated sequences of up to six different 200-view images at a resolution of 127 pixels per inch.

Anomalous Depth Perception Illusion

One of the most traditional phenomenonological questions is how do I know that what you see is the same thing as what I see. If we both look at a picture, and it has the color red, and we both agree it is red, even so, how do I know that the red that you perceive is the same red as I perceive?

The answer is, you don't know. There is natural variation in the red and green cone sensitivities at the very least, and there are other issues involving how the brain processes the information. And of course there are the various types of color blindness and the tests that have been designed to diagnose them.

This post is about an example of an optical illusion that I see, but that no one else that I have tested it on sees. One reason for posting it on the blog is to see if one of my readers will also see the illusion.  So far, I seem to be a "unique". 

Those of you who know about the perception of illusions may skip the next few paragraphs.

For those of you who have never studied the perception of illusions, here are a few things to know. Although we "see" with our eyes, what we see is perceived by our brain, and there is a lot of interesting circuitry in there to process and make sense of the data. This is also an ongoing research topic.  If you have never studied issues of color perception and optical illusions, when you first encounter what we think we know about it, you will be surprised. It is pretty wacky. We are very good at detecting color differences for example, more than the precise color itself. We have lots of circuitry to see movement on the periphery. The point is, seeing is much more than just reporting what may be "objectively there" through the lens of our eye. It is being highly processed all along the way.

But be warned, once you start down the path of understanding color perception and vision you will find that it goes on and on and on.   And then on and on.   Its not simple.

Many optical illusions are essentially bugs in the perception system, that is, the image is causing the perception circuitry to see something that isn't actually there (e.g. motion when there is no motion, colors, when there are no colors, etc). 

Here is an example of a famous illusion that most people are able to see. Its called the Cafe Wall illusion, because its discoverers first noticed it as an architectural detail on the facade of a cafe.

All the horizontal lines in the above image are straight and parallel with each other but most people see the lines at an angle to each other, and also bending depending on where they direct their eyes.  Everyone seems to be able to see this illusion.

The Special K Cafe

Now, look at the following blurry image.

Founders of Google in China from The Register (www.theregister.co.uk)

Most people will see this image as completely flat, e.g. no depth.  It is of course a very blurry image.  I on the other hand always see a lenticular depth effect of something like 3/8's of an inch.  

By "lenticular depth effect" I mean the illusion of depth one gets from a lenticular picture or postcard when you hold it in your hand.  These were more popular years ago, they would often be post cards of the United Nations, or of Elvis.   The postcard would appear to be perhaps an inch thick or even more, but you know, because you are holding it, that is just a piece of cardboard.   The same illusion of depth that you get from such  a postcard is what I see above, except of course that it does not change as I move my head.   It is a picture with depth from one point of view.

I spent a day trying to recreate the illusion with other images, and I think I know what is going on that causes the illusion for me.   But I have not yet found anyone else that the illusion works on.  One thing I find interesting is that, for me, this is a robust illusion.  I see it every time I look at the picture.

Depth perception is notoriously individualistic.   There are many people out there who can not see "3D" from stereoscopic projection.  I have heard the number is 10% of the general population, but I have never gotten a formal confirmation of that percentage (e.g. a reference to a study).   Alternatively, there are people who can see what appears to be stereo in circumstances when they are watching a movie projected flat that moves through an environment.  I get that sensation, in particular when the moving imagery covers peripheral vision.  

But the first question I have, does anyone else other than me see depth in this image?

_________________________________

Wikipedia page on the Cafe Wall Illuson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caf%C3%A9_wall_illusion

Wikipedia page on Lenticular Printing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenticular_printing

Science News article on research into color perception variation:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051026082313.htm

The following two abstracts discuss research in the molecular and genetic basis of variation in color perception.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15811001

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12876837