COLOR ANAGLYPHICAL VR
by Michelle Bienias
Alain Hamblenne has produced some unusual VRs that require the viewer wears glasses with one red lens and one cyan. In fact, they’re exactly the same 3D glasses worn at movies in the 1950s and 60s, and they have the same purpose -- bringing the viewer into a seemingly 3-dimensional image. To correctly visualize the 3D effect, it is necessary to wear the bi-colored glasses, with red on the left and cyan on the right.
Alain credits a meeting with Michel Ericx as being the catalyst that propelled him to continuously work on improving the quality of his photos. He explains that he "much prefers exploring new possibilities and unusual projects rather than large scale VR tours".
Alain's first cylindric anaglyphical panorama was done in April 2001 for the Museum of Natural Science in Liege. A year later, he wanted to start experimenting with cubic panoramas and did a test on a cubic panorama portion in N&B, "garage pompiers". In April 2002, he realized the first color anaglyphical cubic panorama of the church of St. Jacques.
Capturing and putting these images together in order to achieve a 3D effect is not easy, says Alain. “It is necessary to split the view (left eye and right eye). This necessitates moving the camera in order to obtain depth of image. Contrarily, to be able to assemble a panoramic image it is mandatory to get the exact nodal point on the rotation axis.” He calls this the “paradox of the 3D anaglyphical VR”. It requires an extreme precision during the shoot of the single images and fine-tuning of assembly and retouching. For instance, the panorama of the St. Jacques church required about 80 images with multi-row stitching.
After the publication on the Internet of the St. Jacques panorama, he received quite a bit of attention and was the subject of several articles, like the interior of the Palais de Justice in Brussels, which was the subject of an article that appeared in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir.
Alain was born in Brussels and studied graphics at St. Luc. Currently, he lives in Liege and is responsible for the graphic studio, Outline Graphic Designers, which focuses on traditional graphics. He also gives visual communication classes in Haute Ecole Albert Jacquard in Namur, Belgium. Alain works with REALVIZ Stitcher 3.5 on a G4 with 700 MB RAM and 20 inch Apple screen. All his images are shot with an "old" Olympus Camedia C2500L with a 28mm wide conversion lens. He uses a Manfrotto tripod head with a QTVR panoramic head.
So go get your 3D glasses and check out Alain's Church of St. Jacques. And even if you can't find your glasses, St. Jacques is still well worth a visit.
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