World’s first 3D webcam from Minoru: gimmick with built-in headache

Online Gadget retailer Firebox is selling what it calls the first 3D webcam in the world, which is said to be made by Minoru and is available for only $73. It is ugly, the glasses that go with it are ugly. And it will be seen, correctly, as a gimmick.

The webcam looks like a something from out of space but, in fact, it is just two USB webcams working in tandem. They are adjusted to that one shoots in predominantly in red and the other predominantly in blue.

You view the results wearing glasses with red and blue lenses and, with the right scene, you get a three dimensional effect. The video promoting this is of a young girl blowing bubbles at the camera which is the sort of thing that works best.

If you look at such a picture for more than a few minutes you will get a headache. A minute or so is fine. After that it is not a pleasant experience.

The package comes with five sets of special viewing spectacles and, as always with 3D, they are extremely ugly.

This is not true 3D but a cheap and cheerful way of getting on to the Internet, on to your computer.
And it most certainly is not a new idea.

In the late 1890s British film pioneer William Friese-Greene filed a patent for a 3-D movie process. In his patent, two films were projected side by side on screen. The viewer looked through a stereoscope to converge the two images.

Such stereoscopes still exist but they required a fairly heavy machine for viewing — only one viewer at a time. But still 3D was very big in the Victorian era and folding viewers were and, indeed, are, readily available.

The big breakthrough in 3D projection came in April 1953 with Warner Bros. House of Wax which was the first 3D feature with stereophonic sound. As a horror movie it left something to be desired but it did star Vincent Price and he eventually became a typecast horror movie star.  It was not just to be viewed in 3D. For  many American audiences this was the first time they heard recorded stereophonic sound.

This was also the film that typecast Vincent Price as a horror star as well as the “King of 3-D” after he became the actor to star in the most 3D features ( the others were The Mad Magician, Dangerous Mission, and Son of Sinbad ).

But, and this was a major problem, viewing these movies gave the audience a collective headache. So although they had a golden summer in 1953 they were effectively dead in the water within a year.

Now we see them coming to life again as an add-on for the computer age. Most gimmicks have a finite shelf life. Let us see if this is still around by next Christmas.

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