Message #1365

From: Eduard Baumann <baumann@mcnet.ch>
Subject: Re: [MC4D] Stereo for MC4D
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2011 22:20:33 +0100

I have taken a look on all your stereo photographs.
Awsome pictures.
My favorites: the white rose, the clouds and the mars visite.

Kind regards
Ed

—– Original Message —–
From: Melinda Green
To: 4D_Cubing@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2011 9:25 PM
Subject: Re: [MC4D] Stereo for MC4D

Hello Edward,

Welcome to the group! It’s great to see your interesting and enthusiastic messages. I encourage you to introduce yourself and tell us about your life, work, hobbies and your experience of solving the 4D cube.

About GreatStella, yes I’ve been well aware of it starting in 1999 but I doubt that many others on the list know about it. That was when Robert Webb and I were both on a polyhedral mailing list hosted by Magnus Wenninger. It was that list that helped him to define the feature set and I particularly liked his stereo modes. That list was understandably more interested stellations than I was though I see from the description of the current version that he now has a 4D version which could make it a very good tool for 4D puzzle makers. He also supports an "augment" feature in his 3D version that could be very helpful as well.

I’m a huge fan of cross-eyed stereo and have lots of stereo photographs on my site. For that I use an applet that lets the user select from a long list of possible viewing modes. I always prefer cross-eyed viewing myself, and during my last programming work on MC4D I did implement a cross-eyed stereo feature because I believe that it is very valuable for 3D work like this, but I backed it out in the end because I wasn’t able to get it perfect in the time that I was willing to spend on it then. You are right that the animations give a strong sense of 3D. The real value of a stereo mode will be it’s ability to let the user keep the full sense of the 3D projection when it is not in motion which is most of the time. We still have the change set to work from whenever I or someone else next get the urge to work on it. This is listed as issue #35 in our Google Code issues list and it is my highest priority item. I encourage you to see what else is on our list and to comment on them, star your favorite items, and add new bug and feature requests.

Again, welcome to the list, Edward,
-Melinda

On 1/27/2011 7:18 AM, Eduard wrote:

There is a great chance that everybody here knows already the program GreatStella  for presenting 3D polyhedra. One of the marvelous possibilities is the "crossed eyes view". This gives you a beautifull 3D effect with unharmed colors even for animation and you need no glasses or other equipement. This 3D pictures have also a better resolution (sharpness). The effort for the program is not so big because there must only be added a slightly turned copy of the picture. MC4D is so convincing because of his beautifull animation (especially when slow). This can be seriously enhanced with little effort. Here is an example without animation of course and having suffered from screencapture and from sending by e-mail. Everybody knows how to handle crossed eyes view?