Work

We're doing a stereoscopic job at work, which reminds me with gruesome certainty that two years between stereoscopic projects isn't nearly long enough.

For the uninitiated, stereoscopy is the process whereby the picture is designed to look as if it has real depth from the point of view of the audience. This effect used to be called "3D" and it still is for marketing purposes, but behind the scenes we call it "stereoscopy" now in a throwback to the ninteenth century terminology to avoid confusion with computer-generated flat animation that is composed in a virtual three-dimensional space, commonly called "3D animation."

The principle is simple: instead of creating a single stream of frames, we create two streams imaged from slightly different perspectives. The stream designed for the left eye is polarized at 45 degrees, and the stream for the right eye is polarized at -45 degrees. These disparate streams are then projected onto a single surface. When viewed through glasses with each lens polarized to match each stream, each eye can only see a single image stream; the streams are then recombined in the brain. The brain reconciles the contrasting images by deciding the differences are on account of parallax, and informs us that we're seeing depth.

The execution, however, is not at all simple.

The human eye generally employs only convergent image sets to create the illusion of depth (that is, the closer an object is to the viewer the more the images cross into each other). Convergence brings an object closer to the viewer. The problem, however, is that the brain doesn't particularly want to be fooled in this way. It is constantly looking for other cues to help it make sense of what it's seeing, and it's very good at finding them. The edge of the picture frame, for example, gives your brain a clue that things that look like they're sticking out of the screen aren't in fact doing so. The same can be said for the heads of the peole sitting in the audience in front of you.

The solution is to couple a light, selected use of convergence with an ample use of divergence (that is, the further an object is from the viewer the more the images seem to separate away from one another). This sends elements of the image back into the picture plane rather than bringing them forward. The edges of the frame don't interfere with this illusion, because the brain is content to imagine that you're looking through some sort of magical window.

When the ratio of convergence to divergence is incorrect, the result is severe eye-strain, headache and dizziness.

So, one might imagine the solution is to develop a set formula for convergence and divergence tolerances, right? Wrong. The thing is, the amount of convergence/divergence the eye can assimilate is entirely dependant on two factors: how physically large the image is, and how far away from picture plane is from the viewer.

What this means, in short, is that you can't set your convergence/divergence ratios without having at least a vague idea of your destination projection set-up. A print of a stereoscopic movie designed for IMAX, for instance, will employ different ratios than a print destined for a traditionally-sized movie theatre.

So, I'm two weeks away from my deadline and the powers-that-be still haven't nailed down where we're doing the show. The powers-that-be are too mentally meagre to understand why this might affect my work. I've tried drawing diagrams, I've tried using clever analogies, and -- Spaghetti Monster forgive me -- I've even tried throwing a screaming hissy fit. No dice. All I get are blank stares followed by award-winning statements like, "Yeah, I hear where you're coming from, but I still need to understand why the stereo renders aren't ready yet."

My boss seems secretly convinced that I don't know what I'm talking about. He says he trusts my expertise, but he called around to see if he could find an expert stereoscopy consultant to set the record straight. He ran through his contacts in every technologically-advanced province of confederation, and he only came up with one name: mine.

That's right. Apparently, I'm the stereoscopy expert in Canada. If you're reading this now and you're a Canadian stereoscopy expert, let me tell you plainly: you're doing a piss-poor job of promoting yourself.

Since stereoscopy is exploding right now in the United States, everyone local who learns the craft goes south to work for Lucas, Zemeckis or Cameron. All that's left are the dregs, like me, who for whatever batshit stupid reasons think staying in Canada is to their profit.

The upshot is that my boss is now resigned to the fact that I may have a clue. Sadly, this hasn't accelerated the push to nail down our destination projection set-up, or even our method for delivering the media from two frame-accurate polarized sources. There are some really cool machines to do this, but in general they're only available in the United States, or at exorbitant cost, or both.

We're looking into buying our own media server to do the job. If all the details are worked out quickly, we might even get it a few days before it is due to be installed in the set, giving me a window of testing opportunity of, I don't know, about six hours or something before the show is loaded on a plane and flown across the country.

Quoth my boss: "I want you to make absolutely certain this doesn't give anybody headaches."

"Anybody besides me, you mean?"

Just in case that task was not impossible enough on its face, the client's principal symbol is a prism. On screen, what differentiates a prism from a triangle is the fact that it bends the light that passes through it. (Parenthetically, there was some initial debate about whether or not we could show a beam of white light being split into a spectrum by the prism -- initially our client believed this concept was "copyrighted by Claritin" until I (very gently) explained to him that it was actually Isaac Newton who "came up with that creative"). Rendering refracting light is very calculation intensive, and even with my fastest network of giga-computers single frames take upwards of a quarter hour to process.

My boss says, "No problem. Once we get our stereo stuff calibrated, you can just re-render it all before the show."

Oh, sure. There's nothing like taking a sixty-seven hour rendering job and trying to figure out how to accomplish it in twelve hours. What chance do the laws of physics stand against gumption?

...Fock.

Still, it must be said, when all is said and done, that seeing shit jump off your computer screen is neat-o mosquit-o. Stereoscopy is fucking cool. Soon enough it will be everywhere. By 2012 or so the HDTVs that show stereoscopic imagery without the need for glasses should be just about ready for the consumer market, and you know what that means, right? It means when you download pirate movies you'll have to make sure both eye-streams are ripped from the same source. Maybe the new BitTorrent protocol will have a special hash function for checking the match.

No, I haven't seen Beowulf yet.


Home

Littlestar has started working, which means going home is more like another job than ever before. She's managing a liquor and grocery store, working nights until 11, so it's now my daily duty to come home from work in time to feed, bathe, and teach the children before putting them to bed. Combined with the amount of overtime I've been putting in on this stereoscopy job, this has been a fairly harsh trial brokered by cumulative exhaustion and acute stress.

My response: lots of liquor. (Mm'mm...lick-her.)

Drinking liquor helps me sleep, and it also takes the edge off of my compulsive feelings to chop my family up into little bits and press them into aluminium cans for export to some dingy nation where people think wrong and seldom bathe.

You'd think this would give me trouble waking up, but it doesn't because my boy thoughtfully starts screaming bloody murder every morning at 5:30 AM. That's just how he cares to greet the day. It doesn't seem to matter whether or not he's napped, or how late or early he went to bed: 5:30 is unerringly his moment to rise, shine, and bellow.

Littlestar: "You look old, baby."

"I feel old."

Even though the rule is supposed to be that Littlestar can only acquire one new animal each year, this year we have acquired a rabbit, two South American degus, and a kitten. Thus, my livingroom is resplendant with shredded newspaper and the various perfumes of mammal life: excrement, kibble, old vegetables. This is compounded by the children whose prime joys in life recently are to mix up various kitchen or bathroom compounds into "science experiments" which are then left, forgotten, under chesterfields or spilled in the toy box, free to become fetid or sticky or slimey or any combination thereof. They leave the cage doors open, and encourage the animals to get lost in the house.

I vaguely remember my wife. She was this ample blonde with fabulous ya-yas and a knack for making me feel heavenly. Remind me to check her Facebook status so I know what she's up to.


Home School

Popsicle is one award-star away from being entitled to a toy unicorn. She almost lost a star for being saucy the other day, but she managed to hang to it by the skin of her teeth. One more successful lesson and she wins.

A successful lesson is defined as Popsicle correctly answering six out of ten post-lesson questions. She's generally very good at this, and rarely fails to earn a star. She must also obey the Five Rules of School, which are these:

#1. With our eyes, we look.
#2. With our ears, we listen.
#3. With our bums, we sit.
#4. With our mouths, we stay on topic.
#5. With our brains, we try.

Topics we've been covering lately include mixing colours, adding numbers, counting by twos, identifying factors and multiples, recognizing place values and using them to put numbers in the correct order, reading short words, recognizing Latin and Greek root words and using them as a clue to guess meaning, writing her name, identifying major historical civilizations and the sequence in which they arose, understanding the impact of technological change from fire to the telephone, understanding years, centuries and passage of time, identifying whether movies or set in the past, the present, the future or a fantastical realm, identifying geographic features, memorizing the names of local geography, decoding the formulas used in storytelling to predict what will happen next in a movie, identifying animals and understanding how different kinds relate to one another, understanding cumulative change over time and the basic concept of genetic inheritance, differentiating myths from reality, understanding how various members of our family are related to one another, memorizing the names for degrees of kinship, measuring length and volume using standard units, understanding the states of matter (solid, liquid, gaseous, plasma) what causes their transitions into one another, identifying geometric shapes and recognizing symmetrical features, naming familiar celestial bodies, and understanding the relationship between the passage of seasons and the Earth's position and angle. Also, what angles are.

I continue to be blown away by the amount of information she can absorb, and the unprompted acts of synthesis she accomplishes while mulling things over.

So far, so good.


So Very Tired

I am so very, very tired. Between life and writing, I'm feeling quite spent lately. I'm always in a hurry, always pressed for time, always a dollar short, always at pains to patiently explain the obvious to idiots without letting bad attitude leak in.

On the other hand I watched Superbad last night and I thought it was wicked funny.