Students in stereo: Cornell gives out '3-D' glasses for online Mars viewing

Two members of the Cornell Women's Rugby team -- Alicia Macklin '06, left, and Natalie Oliver '07 -- model the free 3-D glasses given out to students in Willard Straight Hall, Feb. 6. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

By Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.

Tickets for the Newport Jazz Festival at Ithaca's State Theater, $17. Admission to the Valentine's Day Dance on the Cornell campus, $5. Seeing the Martian landscape in stereo, priceless.

The "3-D" glasses are free at Cornell, while the supply lasts.

Cornell Provost Biddy Martin has purchased 1,000 red-blue filtered stereo glasses from American Paper Optics in Bartlett, Tenn., for distribution to Cornell students to view online images of Mars. The glasses are available at the information desk at Willard Straight Hall, said Dave Cameron, the provost's special projects assistant who organized the distribution.

American Paper Optics has sold nearly 600,000 pairs of the special glasses in the past month, thanks to the burgeoning interest in Mars, largely due to the spectacular panoramic color images sent from the rovers Spirit and Opportunity and calibrated and corrected at Cornell's MarsLab. "This is just getting started," said American Paper Optics company owner John Jerit. In 1997 he sold nearly 30 million pairs of stereo glasses for the Mars rover Sojourner mission.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the MarsLab take the raw data from the rovers and convert them into stereo-ana-glyph images. Jonathan Joseph, the lead software developer for the Mars panoramic cameras, or Pancams, said he can easily make these images when working with two camera points. The two lenses on each rover's Pancams are 30 centimeters apart, farther apart than human eyes, but enough to obtain excellent stereoscopic imagery from about 10 feet away, said Joseph.

The red, left lens of the stereo glasses filters out the visual red spectrum in the left eye and the blue, right lens filters the blue spectrum from the right eye, tricking the eyes into blending the anaglyph images and giving the impression of a picture in three dimensions.

The history of stereo anaglyphs goes back more than a century to 1891, when Arthur-Louis Ducos du Hauron, a French physicist and a color photography pioneer, patented a device for three-dimensional photography.

Today anaglyphs have gone beyond comic-book and monster-movie gimmicks to being used in scientific research. Daniel Ripoll, of the Cornell Theory Center's (CTC) Computational Biology Service Unit, uses stereo anaglyphs to examine molecular forms. CTC also has used anaglyphs to visualize the time and price of stocks and to understand genetic databases. Anthony Ingraffea, Cornell's Dwight C. Baum Professor of Engineering, uses anaglyphs to predict the structural integrity of engineered and natural structures, including crack propagation in airplane fuselage and engine components. And using an anaglyph, Cornell architectural students have designed and, using a computer visualization, "placed" a new facility into downtown Rochester.