Posts Tagged ‘Youtube’

The world's most popular video sharing service YouTube quietly made an upgrade one year ago — it introduced a 3D content support. This feature was developed by one of Google employees in his spare time, as we know Google allows its staff to work on their own projects for 20% of the work time. The name of that person is Pete Bradshaw, he is a YouTube software engineer.

I bet you have not even noticed that Youtube was supporting 3D. But the service now supports the uploading of stereoscopic footage (2 video streams) that it will mix, in real time, right within your browser.

Here is what Pete says about his achievemnet:

So I went digging for 3D content on the site. And there was a lot, but the issue was that sometimes it was mixed with different colors (because you can get different colored glasses). There's red/green and yellow/blue and all these other things. So if you were uploading 3D video, you basically planned for one specific kind of glasses you wanted to support. If you didn't have just the right pair, you were out of luck.

...We came up with the idea that, well, we could mix the left and right views inside the player and give an experience that works on any of the different-colored 3D glasses.

And so 3D was integrated into the player in a way users could actually use. The shooter uploads two videos side by side, and then we do the mix in the player. Then the viewer tells us the color of their glasses, or if they'd rather do some of the crazy, cross eyed things.

From the first demo, I probably spent 3 weeks of actual work—not all of it continuous because, given my background, I'm more on the backend server side of stuff here at YouTube than the player side.

I definitely think 3D is coming, and it's going to be a standard feature. But adoption rates and exact technologies, if I knew that stuff, I would be investing.

Based on this post.