If you don’t like the options for 3-D content, go out and make some of your own.
That’ll be an increasingly practical option in 2011, thanks to a handful of new 3-D consumer cameras and camcorders.
Previously, you had to be a pretty serious stereophotography enthusiast to make 3-D images or video. Thetechnical requirements for making 3-D photos have gotten lower (in the simplest setup, all you need to do is take a photo with your camera, then move it a few inches to one side and take another). Photo- and video-editing software like Roxio now has built-in tools for making 2-D imagery into 3-D synthetically, or for fusing together two images into a single stereogram. YouTube has tools for creating 3-D videos, and Flickr has forums dedicated to sharing stereo photos.
But it’s all going to get even easier with the advent of cheap cameras with dual lenses that can capture 3-D images on the fly. In 2011, we’ll see Sony’s 3-D Handycam and 3-D Bloggie, five cameras and various 3-D lenses for still cameras from Panasonic, a 3-D Fujifilm camera, and even a 3-D camera from Polaroid.
In this short video, I take a look at some of these technologies on the tradeshow floor of CES.
Because if you have no interest in watching Avatar again, you might still want to look at 3-D photos of your vacation to Paris.