Have a look at these with your 3D glasses... but be ready to pick your jaws up off the floor...

Aram Chaos ("Fly, you fools!!!!")

Arabia Terra - a martian "Monument Valley"? (Save it, then zoom in on some of those mesas and buttes... just wonderful... imagine walking amongst these towering columns of rock... )

WHOA!

Stu, you owe me a new swear jar! Awesome stuff!

Stu, you owe ME an insurance copayment, because I just fractured my jaw after it hit the floor...twice!!!!

(God, I'll never stop thanking you for sending me these glasses...wowwowwow!!!!!!)

Brace yourselves...

Big Country

I give up on the swear jar; it'd be worth more than my retirement fund by now, and I can't afford it. Damn!

Might have just had our first glimpse of the future Martian Republic's first official National Park right there. The way those black sand cliffs envelop those terraced peaks...incredible!!! Can you imagine what that must look like from the ground?

nprev "Can you imagine what that must look like from the ground?"

Like this but WAAYYYY more dramatic.
Click to view attachment

Who can calculate how long it would take Gandalf to hit bottom here?

Whow, those look impressive even without the 3D. I really need to get me some new glasses, I can't believe I managed to loose mine when I moved!

James,

Nip into your local big newsagent and scan the kids magazines for a "summer special" with 3D pics of Hannah Montana or the Tweenies or whatever, it'll have a set of glasses inside, bound to be something. Failing that, most discount bookstores will have a few 3D kids books on dinosaurs or bugs or something, with free sets of glasses inside.

Yeah that was my plan. My last set came from a crappy mag that has a set to go with some 3D tv show that was on in Oz a few years back.

The think I've probably still got the old ones tucked safely inside a book somewhere for transport but I have too many books to be able to find it again!

James - send me your address.


D

Wow !!

Between this and Phoenix ... Its time to update my 3D lectures

Couple more beauts...

http://www.marsunearthed.com/MRO/MRO_Anagl..._089/MRO089.GIF

http://www.marsunearthed.com/MRO/MRO_Anagl...9/MRO039_3D.GIF

Those are absolutely awesome images in 3d, but I think that the dramatic effect is enhanced through a bit of vertical exaggeration (the string of craters in the last image aren't really that deep).

Looking at some of those images it's stunning to see the erosional processes, but there is almost no debris at the bottom of the cliffs.

Wow...

I'd very much like to see them without the vertical stretch...

As I mentioned elsewhere in the forum, the HiRISE site has published over 300 anaglyphs that are viewable with IAS viewer or as PNG or JPEG2000 downloads. This 3D imagery is incredible.

Oersted: Can these images be reprojected to allow them to be displayed without vertical distortion? If not, I'd at least like to see a rough estimate of the vertical distortion for each image for a standard pair of eyes a standard distance from the screen.

How about this? Considering that the distance from our eyes to the screen is the only variable we can easily control that affects the vertical exaggeration we see, why not publish the viewing distance required to deliver a 1:1 geometry for the average pair of eyes?

Can the "convergence angle" published on the anaglyph information page be used to calculate the distance between the camera's position in each pass assuming a constant elevation?

While not an ultimate solution, one quick way to deal with the vertical distortion is to simply move your eyes closer to your monitor.

This one is a good example (using Stu's bandwidth for convenience sake): http://cumbriansky.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/cd7.jpg

I just noticed that if you go to their "Stereo Pairs" link there are purportedly, 905 images.

I'm far-sighted, so I'd have to use a hand lens to do that effectively. But I do use that trick as best as I am able.

I would like to echo Oersted's desire to have the relief rigorously calibrated in some obvious way. I've suggested before having a virtual cube (or sphere?) in the corner of the image to provide a scale key in all three dimensions. If you see the cube as a cube and not as a skyscraper it means you're the correct distance from the screen. (I may be wrong but I think that the correct distance would vary from person to person according to eye spacing, and also from screen to screen according to pixel size.) I do think there's a danger in imagining towers where there are in fact pancakes. It throws your intuitive feeling for a landscape completely out of kilter.

Another feature I'd like to see, and it's now an inclusion on the software I use for building my own 3D images, is for the results to be displayed as not only an anaglyph, but as cross-eyed pairs, and as animated GIF's where the left and right eye images are toggled back and forth. This prevents the user from having to have the red/blue glasses at whatever computer they're using and also gives people like a friend of mine that is virtually blind in one eye the ability to view the 3D effect.

Anaglyphs and other 3D representations used to be a great deal of work to produce but it's a breeze and inexpensive these days with the software out there. The only limitation I can imagine would be the additional bandwidth required to display the various formats and the little bit of additional time required to produce them.

The parallax inherent in the stereo pair will always limit what we can see with our eyes on our screens. Ultimately, the best solution will be to use the data to create a Digital Elevation Model which can then be rendered as you please.

Short of that, one common Martian feature that can be used as a sort of universal candle of dimensional proportions are ripples and dunes. The angle of repose of loosely piled grains controls the aspect ratio of such aeolian structures. If the dunes/ripples appear to be too tall and skinny, you can assume everything else is vertically exaggerated by about the same amount. Other natural features can be similarly used with appropriate adjustments for planetary conditions.

I LOVE that idea. Genius. I often wonder just how accurate the 3D images are, that would be a really useful guide.

Hey Stu - with the power of your propaganda machine behind it it might even happen! Would you like to join my campaign for wraparound panoramas too?
http://personal.strath.ac.uk/andrew.goddard/pan.html

Oops - I promised a few more of these, didn't I? Though do they do anything that the qtvr images don't provide?

Hmmm...I'll schedule in a few days over the Christmas break if there's a desire for more.

Andy G

Great to hear that Andy. I was very much hoping there would be more - and that the idea would catch on more widely (which is why from time to time I have found an excuse to re-post that link).

Yes they do have advantages over vtr (though the reverse is also true, obviously). For one thing they're a lot simpler. For another you can make them without altering a single pixel of a published panorama - it's a loss-free procedure. The two things occupy different niches in my view.

Wow! Yes! Absolutely! Fantastico! (Thanks for reposting that link.)

There you go Andy! There were quite a number of similar reactions on the original thread as I recall. You need not be in doubt they will be appreciated. It's the perfect Christmas 'good deed'. Those panoramas have had an unfortunate encounter with a knife and are waiting for your healing hand.

(Note to SantaG: the view from Husband Hill)

Ok. You got it. And surely there's a Phoenix crying out to be done, too - after all, it didn't budge.

AndyG

I did the spinny polar pan a while back. Does that count?

I'm all for more of those, but aren't they simply mini-MMB views?

If we can have the FLA from which they were made, there's enough 'knowledge' out there to bash out a load of these, I'm sure. There are only 20 or so 360 pancam pans to be done anyway. I'll happily put together a Flash-pan page to host them all.

That one is sort of equivalent to an MMB view using James' color images, which I'm in favor of.

As am I

I'd love to see more of these endless panoramas as well - and as I think I said at the time, if I had the code, I'd happily produce them and host them alongside the normal jpgs on my site.

I have a feeling a couple of new ones are not far away

And then there's the Huygens descent ones, maybe some lunar surface ones from Apollo, at least two of East Anglia from the edge of space , all the mercator maps of every body in the Solar System - in fact everything which has been snipped to make a rectangle when it should be continuous.

I'm thrilled that this looks like it may happen, even if it's happening in the wrong thread!

Here's the link to the original for anyone who missed it:
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=4735

I like that cube idea.

One thing to keep in mind is that most of these images are intended to extract science. Most of the targets don't have extreme relief, so in order to help extract as much information from the stereo images as possible it helps to exagerate the relief. Recall that the pan/navcam spacing on the rovers is about 30 cm, much more than human eye separation, so at a fixed distance rover pancams will exagerate the relief over what we'd see.

Of course as people have pointed out, for any stereo view there is a distance from the image at which the angular separation of your eyes matches that of the cameras that recorded the view. At this distance a cube will look like a cube etc, but everything in the image will be shrunk by a factor of the ratio of the camera baseline to your eye baseline. So the result is like looking at a miniature 3D scale model of the scene.

The point is that that distance from the screen at which a cube looks like a cube etc is in most viewing arrangements considerably closer than we would normally view an image. So at normal-ish viewing distances, the relief is heavily exagerated. As I said, the main goal is to extract information, not to provide realistic relief.

But I agree a cube 3D scale would at least give us the option of getting the distance roughly right to get a realistic sense of the relief. I'm all for that.

One analogy is with false colour. Tweaking the colour is often done to extract more info than you'd easily get from true-ish colour. But at least true-ish colour is often provided to give us a sense of what the scene might look like to our own eyes.

. . and nicely back on topic. I assume there is enough geometrical information attached to the pairs used to make the anaglyphs for the image experts here to construct the cubes, should anybody feel it's worth their while. I wonder if that would inevitably be a laborious process, different for each anaglyph, or whether it could be 'automated' in some way so as to work for them all?

You would have to render a pair of them uniquely for the angle between the two observations for each one. And then it would be a judgement call on how to co-register the two renders to be similar to the coregistration of the HiRISE image. It really wouldn't be worth it.

Two variables: the angle between the views and the distance to the virtual image. It sounds impractical to do 'post hoc' as you describe, but maybe not so for the Hirise team themselves. Maps have linear scales so it seems to me that anaglyphs should have vertical scales too, as a matter of routine. Impractical or not it would be entirely in keeping with the UMSF mission if someone here were to pioneer the idea. I only wish I had the know-how to do it myself.

I wasn't sure this warranted a new thread, and I didn't find it mentioned elsewhere on this forum, so I bring to your attention some flyover movies on the HiRise website.
http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/media/

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=5073 is similar.