The eyes have it
“COME and have a look at this,” Mike Dugdale said to me.
I’d given Mike a crazy task — to make a 3D edition of the newspaper.
“You know. You put the special glasses on and the photos jump out at you,” I said. Mike had looked at me askance. This couldn’t be any further removed from the hard news photography he did every day at the Geelong Advertiser.
His diary was full of court cases, magazine shoots and local footy games.
Now the boss wanted him to stick his neck out and produce, with zero budget, 3D photography on newsprint. Nuts. I followed Mike to the photographic closet (you could hardly call it a department, but at least they had a window).
He pointed to the floor. “There you go,” he said proudly, beaming. This is what I saw. A short piece of timber with a groove cut into it, just a few centimetres long. I didn’t see any 3D pictures.
“Watch this,” Mike said. “I stick my monopod against the left hand side of the groove …” He jammed the leg into the slot. “…and take a picture, snap, and then I shove it hard right and take another picture, bang!
“Now, I’ve got two pictures of the same scene taken just like you see them, one with the left eye and one with the right!”
He handed me a pair of cardboard 3D glasses from Village Cinemas and we looked at a blurry picture freshly spat from the printer.
The picture didn’t jump out at me like a horror flick. Instead, it went the other way. I was looking deep, deep into a 3D shot of the newsroom. I could almost dive in. Cool. Over the subsequent weeks we planned a 3D campaign lasting a month that included front page splashes, eight-page liftouts and 3D posters.
We would be the first newspaper in the southern hemisphere, perhaps the world, to publish in 3D.
And, by gum, we did. That was April 1, 2007.
Everyone thought it was an April Fool’s joke, but the joke was on them.
News had crossed into a new dimension.
Two weeks ago, I entered my own 3D virtual world and have been walking around in it every moment of every day.
I don’t have a piece of fabulous augmented reality technology wired to my frontal cortex.
I’m not wearing a headset when advertis- ing signs jump out at me, screaming red logos vaulting across the room.
I’m as human as can be when I stare deeply into paintings that have layers upon layers of detail.
I haven’t gone mad just yet. But ... I do have a new prescription for a shaky eye — and it has gone awry. When I watch my HD TV, the footy scores are at least 10cm in front of the screen. When I walk past the lifts at work, the morning news is a scrabble board of words in various degrees of relief, depending on their colour. I am seeing in 3D — and this time the images jump out at me like crocodiles. I Googled it. Of course I did. And I’m not alone in my alien world. There’s a counter culture out there of people with bung eyes and LSD-free visions. I’ve yet to see my optometrist to confirm it, but this quirk seems to be a convergence of lens angles, the super resolution of today’s glasses technology and a hint of Mike Dugdale’s groovy piece of wood. I’m not seeing another dimension of people I meet just yet. But perhaps that’s just around the corner in my augmented reality. If you have extraordinary vision like this — or any other special ability — drop me a line at: peter.judd@news.com.au. We might yet form the Justice League of Australia.