Surprise ! Just posted a teaser 3-D astro video on my YouTube channel. It’s HERE. Have a look !
It’s just for enjoyment – but I have another motive. If you can’t see some explanatory text when you get there … please press the little triangle at the right hand side under the picture – see it circled in red, two swipes to the left here. OK ! Did you go there ? You CAN just free-view (parallel) the small movie clip. But it will be MUCH more entertaining if you turn the phone on it’s side – and free-view or put the phone in your OWL VR Kit [ https://shop.londonstereo.com/VRKIT.html ]- or even view with a LITE OWL [ https://shop.londonstereo.com/LITE.html ] . I want to use this as a basis for a tutorial which I will try to post right here – explains the whole thing – so that you can watch our 3-D ZOOM launch of the Cosmic Clouds 3-D book on the 24rd of this month. OK ?
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Tutorial for watching YouTube in 3-D
– https://youtu.be/XeryC4YVNhw
I hope this is self-explanatory, dear folks. The link to the HORIZONS clip I’m referring to which is up on YouTube right now (I just checked!) can be found HERE.
And there’s a bit more explanation in my previous post right here [above].
Owning up … there are two howling mistakes in this clip (sorry – it was a long day !). Firstly the inventor of the stereoscope was NOT Sir David Brewster, but the genius Charles Wheatstone. This is rather an embarrassing error because Brewster spent a large part of his life trying to claim, falsely, that DID invent the stereoscope, and trying to discredit Wheatstone. What Brewster really did was popularise a compact form of the stereoscope (not very different from my OWL) which led to a huge craze for stereoscopic entertainments in the 1850s. Second mistake – of course, 8pm British Summer Time is actually 7 pm Greenwich Mean Time. So ! Please play with all this for the next week until the Launch of Cosmic Clouds 3-D on the 23rd September.
TRANSCRIPT: [By Jen Tunney E&OE]
Hi Folks
It’s Bri and what am i doing here.
Well I’m here to help because we’re launching “cosmic Clouds 3-D” book on the 23rd and I think it’s 8 o’clock British summer time it will be on YouTube and a lot of it will be in stereo. It will be in 3-D and we’ll be showing pictures from the “Cosmic Clouds” book, which is this book here – very very beautiful book – which I’m very very proud to be launching, written by David Eicher,with illustrations by J.-P. Metsavainio, who is the most incredible astronomer and artist and has managed to make 3-D pictures out of his own photography.
You’ll find out all about that at the launch but what I’m here to do is to try and show you what you can do if you want to watch the presentation in 3-D. I’ve put up a practice video, which is a teaser from an astro video that i put together with Dennis [Pellerin]. who’s filming this right now – for our for Starmus a few years ago. He was dedicated to Stephen Hawking and he was able to watch it from the audience while we projected it.
What i’ve put up is just a teaser – about three and a half minutes – to show you what the Horizons video is like ,which at some point we will put out there. But the other reason for putting it up is so you can practice with whatever instruments you have at your command, so you can see us in 3-D when we launch this book.
So here I have my my iPhone. I want to show you what you do. The best way to watch it we think is with an iPhone, and with this wonderful device which is an OWL VR Kit. This is the London Stereoscopic Company OWL which I’m proud to have invented, well, designed if you like. I didn’t invent the stereoscope David Brewster [CORRECTION: Charles Wheatstone] did that in 1832, but this comes in a very nice little presentation pack and you get a kind of demo here. The important thing is it has this wonderful magic screen on the back which is actually [a] kind of a fridge agnet and this will enable your phone to stick to it and you can use this whole thing as a very very perfect stereoscope.
It’s Victorian style but it’s the best. This is the only way to watch 3-D really, so on your iPhone on the day, you’ll be able to see something like this.
And again, this is the practice film which I put up on youtube and you can hopefully see right now. It’s called “Horizons “and you can see the pictures are double. This is a stereoscopic picture.
You need to turn your phone on its side. It’s not going to work if you do that or this. It doesn’t work. It’s got to be on its side, okay.
And then hopefully you have time to get yourself an OWL VR Kit. It’s about a week’s time. If you don’t have one of these please go to the London stereoscopic website and get one.
What you do is – there’s a magnetic strip on the back of your phone [by now?] and you put this into your OWL and so the stereoscope is now working. You can look at us and the pictures that we’ll be presenting in 3d in this way. You can focus and I’m hoping it’s going to work. We’re going to keep a sense of humour. You won’t actually see me in 3- D. Maybe next time. You know, we haven’t got all the tech
nology together yet but you will see all the pictures of the cosmic clouds, the nebulae which J.-P. has made.
So here I am looking at the demo at the moment, looking at “Horizons”. It’s just the first three and a half minutes of the full length thing which is about 12 minutes and here we are in Tenerife looking at the first astronomical observations done at high altitude and the film takes you through human endeavour to see into space. Okay.
This is in my opinion the best way to watch the transmission. If you don’t want to do it on your phone, there’s another way. You can use your laptop. So i’m going to stop this for a moment and we’ll start it up on the laptop now. The laptop can be full screen but you can compress it down if you want because it’s YouTube. You can make the screens more if you like to make it easier to view in 3-D like this. You can make it small but if it’s full screen size you can’t use your OWL. Well you can, I mean I can, because my eyes do that stuff but normally you wouldn’t be able to watch this with an OWL. You need a different piece of equipment. You need something like this…which is available again you can probably get it inside a week. It’s a system of mirrors very much like the original Wheatstone stereoscope and has a knob on the top to adjust the separation. With this you can look at your TV screen, your laptop screen and move your little knob here and it will do it for you. It will fuse the images together with a little bit of patience and you can see all this in 3-D, so this is an alternative way to watch and it works very well [with] this viewer. Just takes a bit of patience and you’ll need to focus. You probably need to wear your glasses as well as this if you wear glasses.
There are other devices you can use [such]as a prismatic device.
We’re going to put some details up. I’ll post some details up of these things but these are nice for looking on laptops. To me it’s not quite such an immersive experience as using your OWL and of course the screen on your phone is much higher definition than the screen on your laptop, but this is pretty good.
Now just a word of warning. Not everything will be in 3-D. You won’t be able to see us in 3-D so from time to time you will take this off and just look at it full screen and you’ll put your viewer down and just watch us on the screen but whenever the pictures come on the presentations from myself and David Eicher, use your viewer – whatever viewer you have – and you can see it all in 3-D and then I hope you will be bitten by the stereoscopic bug and you have to buy all our books and our viewers and stuff.
I have a new announcement soon on the viewer but for the time being if you want to do this and join us, please do, and my recommendation is get yourself an OWL because it’s a lot of fun and you can take pictures of your friends and do them in stereo as well. I will put instruction videos up for those as well if you want.
It’s a lot of work coming so God bless. Thank you for being with us and I will see you at the launch 23rd of September, 8 o’clock I believe. Really summer time which is 7:30 GMT – is that right? I think that’s right. You have to check.
God bless you all see you soon.
Bri
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Credit Brian May
80 years ago, brave men and women came together to achieve victory in the Battle of Britain, saving our country’s freedom. Today, as we mark Battle of Britain Day, there are still RAF veterans, and their partners, who might be in urgent need of support but have fallen off the radar. That’s why I’m supporting the RAFBF’s campaign to get them Back On The Radar to receive the help they need and deserve.
Join The Search. Visit rafbf.org/radar to find out more.
I feel a great bond with the RAF. My Dad flew in Mosquitoes and Beaufighters – not Spitfires – but the commitment and the courage were the same. Let us never forget these brave men and women – our debt can never be repaid.
Cheers !
Bri