Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
From the brains behind Brains On, this is the Moment of Um. Answering those questions that make you go, Um. Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Anna Goldfields.
Oh, man, I am super excited for this 3D showing of my favorite movie, Ratatouille. I got my popcorn, got these cool 3D glasses. Hang on, gotta unfold them. Oh, no, I got popcorn butter on my ear. Okay, here we go. Whoa, that piece of cheese is coming right out of the screen at me. Woo!
Look at that spoon action when Remy the rat stirs that sauce. This is exhilarating! Sorry everybody, I got overexcited. These 3D glasses are amazing! I wonder how they work. I'm not the only one wondering. Hi, my name is Olek. My question is: How do 3D glasses work? Hi, I'm Tuta Gilbert. I'm a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The first thing to know about 3D glasses is that they have one red lens and one cyan lens. Cyan is a color that is also called turquoise or if you look at a cell phone screen or a computer monitor, it's usually generated by the mixture of blue and green.
Red and cyan are two complementary colors. They're as different from each other as two colors could ever be. Other couples of complementary colors are yellow and blue or magenta and green. But in this case, we use the most common, which is cyan and red.
Why are they used and why do they generate a 3D image? Because two separate images have been acquired beforehand with two capabilities.
two cameras, one with the red filter and one with the cyan filter from two different angles. Just like the two eyes on my face look at an object, let's say a cube, from two slightly different angles because they are at two slightly different positions. They have slightly different images of the same cube.
Now, imagine that one of my eyes or one camera is taking this image in red and one of them is taking it in cyan. Then these two images, red and cyan, are actually combined with a computer. And then when you wear glasses and look at this computer combined image, you reconstruct
3D movies are incredible, and they've been around much longer than you think, since 1915. A scary movie called House of Wax was the first major 3D film to be filmed in color in 1953.
The star of the movie, Vincent Price, wore such horrifying makeup for the film that he wasn't allowed to leave the studio while wearing it in case he frightened people. I still can't believe that my brain can put together two different two-dimensional pictures to make one three-dimensional one. That is some physics wizardry. Maybe someday movie theaters will show movies with 3D smell-o-vision. ♪
If you like this episode, take a second to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you're looking to learn facts that really sparkle, check out the Brains On podcast where we have a whole episode all about crystals. That's a crystal. If you have a moment of um question, we'd love to help you answer it. Drop us a line by going to brainson.org slash contact. See you next time and the next day and the next day and every weekday. Until then, um...
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