Abstract
Introduction Stereoscopic (S3D) content is expensive to produce, especially in live-action where it requires the use of expensive camera rigs to capture images from two different viewpoints without introducing misalignments or distortions. Accordingly, commercial producers sometimes use a trick to generate short amounts of cheap "S3D" content from 2D content: they shift the 2D content horizontally left (right) by a fixed amount to produce content for the left (right) eye. Geometrically, this content is depicted on a planar surface behind the physical screen plane. Anecdotally, this manipulation is said to permit an impression that the scene is being viewed in S3D, presumably because it permits monocular depth cues such as motion parallax, occlusion and shading to dominate. Methods 9 participants viewed 13 30-second clips from the S3D production "Micro Monsters" in four different configurations: Natural S3D (the original content); Natural 2D (unedited, taking the left eye of the S3D clip); Translated S3D (the original content with a fixed horizontal shift applied in opposite directions to left and right-eye images) and Translated 2D (a fixed horizontal shift applied in opposite directions to the original left-eye image, to generate a new left and right image-pair). The 52 resulting clips were presented in a random order on an LG passive 3D television, while an eyetracker measured eye position. After each clip, participants were asked to rate the impression of depth on a 7-point Likert scale. Results Participants rated both types of S3D as having significantly better depth than 2D. There was no difference between Natural 2D (median 4) and Translated 2D (median 4); p=0.07 (Wilcoxon signed-rank). Eye movements also differed between S3D and 2D. Conclusion This industry trick does not fool the audience: applying constant parallax so as to present 2D video content behind the screen plane does not make it appear S3D.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2016