Would you go to the Job Centre or DMV in the Metaverse?


A VR headset.

I'm just getting started with the Oculus Quest 2 from Facebook Meta. It is amazing. OK, that's a lie. It's a pretty good tech demo of what one vision of the future could look like. But it is making a little bit of my brain itch. What Government services0 could / should be run in […]

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Où est L'Inconnue de la Seine en 3D?


Black and white photo of the face of a young woman. Her eyes are closed and she is gently smiling.

Twitter can be amazing sometimes... I was reading about "L'Inconnue de la Seine". The face of a young woman found drowned in the river Seine in the 1800s. Her death mask was enormously popular - with copies of it appearing all over the world. Her smile was compared to the Mona Lisa and her face […]

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How to detect 3D video?


Still from the moview Finding Nemo. The image is split side by side.

Here's an interesting conundrum. My TV can automatically detect when 3D video is being played and offers to switch into 3D mode - but how does the detection work? This post will give you a few strategies for detecting 3D images using Python. Firstly, some terminology. 3D videos are usually saved either as Side-By-Side images, […]

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Reconstructing 3D Models from The Last Jedi


Different depth maps of various accuracy

A quick tutorial in how to recover 3D information from your favourite 3D movies. In this example, we'll be using Star Wars - The Last Jedi. tl;dr? Here's the end result (this video is silent): Grab the code on GitHub. Let's go! Take a screenshot of your favourite scene. Something with a clearly defined foreground […]

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Review: Svpro 3D Camera - for Android and Raspberry Pi


I've been sent a 3D camera addon to review - the Svpro SV-2560X3D-001 is a £65 stereo camera designed for Android. It will also work with a Raspberry Pi! It looks a little like a Microsoft Kinect - a single bar with two embedded cameras. The camera resolution is 720p on each lens. You can […]

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How 3D is Star Wars The Force Awakens?


Big Star Wars banner outside a cinema.

This blog post looks at the 3D conversion process for The Force Awakens. Where it succeeds and where it falls short. Last year I managed to blag tickets to the premiere of The Force Awakens - in 2D. The next day, we saw it again in 3D. I've never been a huge fan of 3D […]

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Reducing the filesize of complex 3D .OBJ models


Loading large 3D Models in the browser is extremely resource intensive. 2D images are trivial to resize and resample with negligible loss of perceived quality. 3D resizing is complex. As part of my "Pirate Museum" I wanted to display 3D scans of statues using WebVR. The only problem is, these files are huge. Take The […]

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Help! How do I extract 3D objects from PDFs?


The PDF file icon with a big red line through it.

You know how the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is neither democratic, nor particularly for the people, nor a republic? Yeah, so it turns out the "Universal 3D" format is pretty far from Universal! A little backstory... The Europeana Carare Project has some gorgeous 3D scans of ancient monuments and heritage sites. The only problem […]

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Creating Animated Gifs from 3D Movies (HSBS to Gif)


A few days ago, I posted this animated gif that I'd created from the 3D Doctor Who Special. I created that gif manually, but I wondered if it was possible to create such an animation in an automated fashion. Turns out, it's pretty easy! This relies on ImageMagick - which is a powerful image manipulation […]

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BBC iPlayer and 3D


I loved the latest episode of Doctor Who. What made it even better was the fantastic use of 3D. It had just enough "wow" moments to make the use of technology worthwhile - without totally overdoing it. I watched the episode live at home on my Panasonic TX-L37ET5B. After the broadcast, I wanted to watch […]

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