Sep 18
Some gadgets just hit the “awesome” button in the deep, lizard part of your brain. At an NVIDIA meeting today, my “awesome” button got smacked hard by the Fujifilm FinePix REAL 3D W1, the world’s first point-and-shoot, consumer 3-D digital camera. It’s expensive, somewhat awkward, and probably impractical. But it’s really cool.
The W1 is a bit of a brick, sure, but who cares? It’s 3-D! The camera is black and glossy, and looks a little like a Sony Cybershot T-series with its big, slide-down shutter cover. It’s much thicker than a Sony T-series (but still easily handheld) and it has – woah now – two lenses on the front. It uses those lenses to take two images, which it merges together into a 3D picture.
The W1 takes both photos and videos in 2D and 3D mode. I took a bunch of 3D photos and recorded a 3D video. The 3D photos come through in .MPO format, a new multiple-image format supported by NVIDIA’s 3D Vision kit ($199), a set of drivers and glasses which turn any monitor into a 3D device. The 3D videos are a pair of streams stored in a standard AVI container; the NVIDIA 3D Vision’s software player knows how to merge them into a 3D movie.
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