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Friday September 18, 2009
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 Some gadgets just hit the "awesome" button in the deep, lizard part of your brain. At an NVIDIA meeting today, my "awesome" button got smacked hard by the Fujifilm FinePix REAL 3D W1, the world's first point-and-shoot, consumer 3-D digital camera. It's expensive, somewhat awkward, and probably impractical. But it's really cool.
The W1 is a bit of a brick, sure, but who cares? It's 3-D! The camera is black and glossy, and looks a little like a Sony Cybershot T-series with its big, slide-down shutter cover. It's much thicker than a Sony T-series (but still easily handheld) and it has - woah now - two lenses on the front. It uses those lenses to take two images, which it merges together into a 3D picture.
The W1 takes both photos and videos in 2D and 3D mode. I took a bunch of 3D photos and recorded a 3D video. The 3D photos come through in .MPO format, a new multiple-image format supported by NVIDIA's 3D Vision kit ($199), a set of drivers and glasses which turn any monitor into a 3D device. The 3D videos are a pair of streams stored in a standard AVI container; the NVIDIA 3D Vision's software player knows how to merge them into a 3D movie.
The 3D photos looked sharp and thoroughly 3D on a monitor with the 3D Vision kit. The 3D movie mode wasn't perfect, but it was passable; it was a little bit out of focus and we saw some ghosting in the foreground.
 The LCD on the back (shown at left) has a built-in 3D effect (no glasses necessary) that makes you dizzy after a few minutes of using it. The back of the camera is festooned with buttons, and I couldn't easily get a grip on the UI with just a few minutes to use it, but it was easy to switch between 2D and 3D modes.
The Fujifilm W1 will be available in the US soon, NVIDIA said. Don't expect it to be cheap; models imported from Japan currently cost $600. The 3D Vision kit is available now.
Here's what a photo taken in 3D mode looks like without 3D glasses on, by the way!
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September 25, 2009 5:58 PM
This is an interesting camera, but we need another 3D standard like we need a hole in our heads. RealD has now become very popular in the movie theatres with all the movies released this year. A consumer camera should use the same format allowing us to use the same glasses that they give away in the theatres.
September 27, 2009 11:57 PM
I haven't seen the theatre glasses, but I suspect that they use two projectors with Polarized filters and glasses. It's not possible to use these with a single source, however it might be possible to use "blinking" technology to deliver alternating images to the display. It's kind of similar to the 3D effect you see when a camera dollies sideways across a multidepth scene in a movie.