3D Videos on YouTube

Here's an interesting video Tom Scott's added to YouTube:


We've had 3D discussions before (such as this one I made a couple of years ago) but interestingly here this is actually far less nauseating than the video posted in the above thread with the Pet Shop Boys on Children in Need 1993. And a lot of others that are on YouTube.

I suspect the Pet Shop Boys video, apart from being OTT with visuals, suffers from the fact the constantly moving video isn't "regular", it varies in speed and what not, plus you have all the studio lights, flashing and what not, whereas Scott and his friend Matt Grey have at least tried to keep a relatively circular arc and speed to smooth the effect out in natural daylight.

This isn't the first 3D video on YouTube by any stretch of the imagination. But its one of the better ones. Appears that subject matter and what you're filming has more impact that just spinning a camera round a random tree in a forest somewhere.

(wasn't sure where to put this, in the YouTube thread or the main forum, so I'll leave it here and if its better elsewhere, somebody can shift it).

The key thing about the Pulfrich effect is that the camera has to keep moving AND there has to be parallax in the shot (i.e. elements at different depths moving at different relative speeds)

YouTube does have a few 3D viewing modes. If you look at this video (an unbilled test which went out live on the BBC HD channel in 2011) on a desktop, then it'll let you pick from a few, including polarised glasses, if your screen supports it; on the mobile app it defaults to red/green glasses, but can also display it for a VR headset.



Note that it includes a bit of 2D at the start, and the 3D content was uploaded as broadcast, in side-by-side mode.

There's also this Sky 3D promo, which is probably a bit more interesting, content-wise.



Edit: apparently the various 3D viewing modes didn't make it across to the HTML5 player, but are still there if you force it to Flash. Details here.