This is just an animation I felt like making. Silhouettes of men and women in business attire, walking against a wall of large hundred-dollar bills.

I made the animation in Flash. It uses two movie clips, one man walking and one woman walking, which I got from a stock animation by Andrew Doran on iStockPhoto.

Click on the screenshot to go to "3D Flash in 3D":

Dan Ridley-Ellis, an engineer at Napier University in Edinburgh, Scotland, made this interactive animation showing all the different ways a piece of lumber can be bent. There are about 18 controls you can use to adjust all the complicated factors being calculated.

Dan's anaglyphic photography and video on his Flickr gallery are also worth seeing.

I thought I should try Papervision3D, an open-source ActionScript 3D engine, to see if I could use it for anaglyphic animations and games and such. So I downloaded it, and did their "Rotate" example, then turned it into an anaglyph:

I got it to work, but not how I hoped. I was hoping to have two cameras in the scene, a left and a right, looking at the same objects, and apply some kind of color filter to each camera, red for one, cyan for the other. Then, render both the cameras.

But it didn't work that way. I could put two cameras in the same scene, but I couldn't render them both. If I tried, only the second one actually rendered.

And so, to make this anaglyph, I actually had to have duplicates of everything. Not just two cameras, but two containers, two scenes, and two rotating squares too (since I couldn't register the same square with both scenes). It doesn't seem efficient, and it's almost exactly the opposite of my original goal, which was to create 3D effects one symbol at a time. So, Papervision3D might not be for me.

On the other hand, some other developers have managed to do very nice anaglyphs with Papervision3D. For example this works very well [1]. And this is quite good (be sure to turn "STEREO 3D: ON," in the lower right corner) [2]. And so is this [3].It is possible that they have hit upon something that I haven't found yet. So I won't totally write PV3D off yet, until I know more.

FOOTNOTES:
[1]: Ben Stucki (Ben Stucki did post his source code, but I think it's for Flex instead of Flash.)
[2]: Barcinski and Jeanjean
[3]: Mr. Doob

At the heart of any good Flash anaglyph engine would be a function that renders objects at the correct scale, and at the proper red/cyan offsets, based on their z-axis value (or how far they are away from the viewer). This experiment uses a simple formula to render an object in 3D at any given distance. Move the slider back and forth to render the egg closer or farther.

The units are in inches from your monitor surface. That is, if z = 3", that means it's supposed to appear that the egg is three inches deep into your monitor. A negative value means it is sticking out that many inches in front of your monitor.

The computation makes assumptions for factors I can't measure, and these assumptions are probably not all true. (It assumes your monitor resolution is 72 pixels per inch. It assumes your pupils are 2.5 inches apart. It assumes you are sitting 24 inches back from your monitor.) If the assumptions are untrue, your perceived depth will differ from the given depth proportionally. (To see just how much these factors would affect the calculations, see experiment 05.)

At the extreme negative range, ghost images appear. In a real game or animation, I would avoid these, but I wanted to test the extremes in this experiment.

Cartoon Network has a side-scroller game in anaglyph 3-D. It's called Cheese Quest 3D. I played it for about a minute, and I thought I should blog about it to tell you how much I liked it!

Not much.

My daughters, aged 7 and 8, enjoy looking at 3D images. But when they ask me, "Daddy, can you show me how to draw in 3D?" it is with a heavy heart that I tell them, "No, it's kind of hard. You'll learn in a few more years."

But now, thanks to interactive designer Paul Neave, I don't have to tell them that anymore. I can just send them over to his Neave Anaglyph game, and they can doodle in 3D to their hearts' content.

Yes, this Flash gizmo that Neave has made is so easy that even a young child can make 3D doodles. It is very simple: there is only one drawing tool, one color (black), and two buttons (left and right arrows). There is no undo command, so if you screw up with a stray line (as I did in my doodle above), you should just accept it as a charming flaw.

Oh, and if you want to open the hood, the source code is downloadable! Thanks, Paul.