Today’s creative journal inspiration: “What’s your favourite animal? Use it as your inspiration today.”
I like cats.
Keeping with the themes of papercraft and getting things done, I figured that I would build something that I’ve been meaning to for quite a while: a stereo viewer for my iPod Touch.
Minh and I bought a pair of reading lenses a while ago with this in mind. Here’s a picture of the original testing we did. When held very close to the eyes, these lens do a great job of focussing each half of a side-by-side stereo image.
I initially thought that I would make an fov2go, but the lenses I have appear to be too small (that, and the fov2go build look fairly complicated). So I just winged it.
The lens remind me of cat eyes, and I decorated the viewer to be even more cat-themed.
Overall, the viewer works quite well (with a rather convincing 3D effect) despite the image bleed (because I didn’t put in a central divider). If you make a similar device, you can easily test it by searching for “yt3d” videos on YouTube. (Interestingly, there’s a full-length 3D version of Titanic on Youtube… although it’s not in English.)
If anything, making this has just made me want a Hasbro My3D. They’re currently cheap to buy in the US (presumably since they were made for the last generation of iOS devices), but shipping to Australia is awfully expensive. On the other hand, I think they’re cool and you can make games for it using Unity3D… hmmm… maybe I’ll just wait for my Occulus Rift.