Hack - Shoot 3D Images With Dual Camcorders

We've been promised 3D movies for a long time. I think it's right up there with flying cars and true virtual reality. The closest thing we have to it is called stereoscopy. That's basically where you have two pictures that are shot side-by-side and also set beside each other. You then basically look at them cross-eyed which results in a 3D image. Now wouldn't it be cool if you could shoot film so it could be viewed in 3D?

If you happen to have a couple of spare video cameras handy, you can actually hack them to shoot stereoscopic video. The obvious thought would be to just hold them close and hit record at the same time, but that really doesn't work so well. You would actually need to use a 3d lanc master which reads the crysal frequency from one camera and write to the RAM of the other using Sony's lanc protocol. This gives you a clock offset of +/- 3ms.

Granted, most people are happy shooting in good old 2d, as they prefer not to either wear special glasses or go cross-eyed. However, for those of you that strive for something a little different, you might check this out.

3D video with consumer cameras [via hackaday]