Two Eyes, 3D

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2011-11-11T17:06:00.003-05:00

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First major study of 3D in the classroom? Nope.

2011-10-25T15:39:00.006-04:00

Wired has an article about a large-scale study of the use of 3D in the classroom in Europe. Overall, I agree with pretty much everything the author says. But I want to expand on some of it.

First, this study was funded by Texas Instruments, a major player in the 3D field. They stand to gain lots of profit from increased adoption of 3D technology. Also, the study was not published in a peer reviewed journal. Instead, the results were published in the form of a white paper and YouTube video case studies. The white paper reads as a 6-page marketing brochure and gives almost no information on how the study was conducted. It certainly does not include enough information to judge its quality. That does not by itself mean the results are bad. But it means we can't truly evaluate them because the details are hidden. In other words, this is not a scientific study. So take it for what it's worth...

Secondly, the Wired commentator mentions the effect of novelty on the experiment. That is, students may learn more simply because they are paying closer attention due to the 3D effect. I am glad he mentioned this as it is often ignored in stereoscopy studies. I think it has a major, major impact and has to be controlled for. In our study, we intend to control for it by having all students wear 3D glasses in all experiments - regardless of whether they are seeing the visuals in 3D or 2D. So, at least in the beginning (and in my experience likely the entire time) the students will think they are seeing 3D whether they are or not.

Still, this Texas Instruments study is a useful one. Why? Because it is the first large scale experimental study of this type I've yet seen in the literature. So it at least offers some insight. Even though it isn't scientific and thus cannot be trusted on its face, it can be used as a sort of thought experiment to think about things differently. For example, the white paper says "The 3D pupils were more likely to use gestures or body language when describing concepts." (p. 3) I noticed this as well in my first study and that is why we are doing our assessments for this project using iPads. We are going to use the accelerometers to follow how students hold the device as they answer questions as a measurement of embodied cognition.

There is a funny statement in one of the videos:

"There is never any behavior problem [when using the glasses]..."

Hah. In my experience in an 8th grade classroom, the kids were indeed a little more subdued when wearing the glasses, but they were by no means perfect. There was plenty of joking around, picking on each other, etc. All the typical things that go one in a classroom were still going on. This was completely a marketing maneuver.

The TI web site says this is "pilot" data. So I wonder if it will ever be published. It presents the head researcher as the "Director of the International Research Agency". I have not heard of that before, and Google-fu turned up zilch. So I question the legitimacy of that organization. I did find the CV of the researcher, and it is impressive. But it's in the field of art education, not cognitive science. Again, this does not mean the research is bad. It just means that I put the chance at ultimate publication at less than 50%. Although I sincerely hope that I'm wrong. If published, it could be a nice contribution to the field.

ASTC 2011

2011-10-18T11:59:00.002-04:00

I'm in Baltimore for the 2011 meeting of the Association of Science and Technology Centers. They are basically the main trade group for science museums, planetariums, aquariums, zoos and just about any informal science organization. They have about 1700 attendees at this conference.

Yesterday they had a morning panel on 3D film development held in the IMAX theater at the Baltimore Science Center. It was a pretty good session for someone like me. I'm new to the production side so it was an interesting glimpse into what goes into 3D film. I know the basics, of course, but my experience is on a completely different scale. For one of the films, they had something like 250+ CPUs crunching for over a week to render just a single model of a star formation region. I thought with modern machines those days were over - apparently not. Moore's law applies to animation as well as the CPUs that render it.

One person in the audience kept raising a question about fidelity to reality. Let's say you have a 3D image of the Andromeda galaxy. In real life, the human eye cannot see stereo beyond 50 feet or so. To get stereo images of mountains and such, the photographer has to physically move the cameras far apart to create the parallax needed. For galaxies, this is simply impossible. Even if we had Star Trek/Wars type of technology, we wouldn't be able to do it. The distances are just too great.

So are we lying by showing such an image? The panel basically said "Yes!". They claimed artistic license is needed to keep it entertaining. I think there was only one astronomer on the panel, the rest were primarily visualizers and directors. But I know some of them personally and I know of the others. They are actually careful to be faithful to the science, where possible. I think they were limited in their responses because the session was running out of time (since we were in a theater, we are unable to "run over" because other films were scheduled). So kudos to them for being honest, but I think the reality is more complicated.

My take is that whether you are being faithful to truth or not is based on the learning goal of the film. Is the goal to show what something would look like to the human eye? (As would be the case in training video, for example.) In that case, the stereoscopic galaxy is indeed a lie. But what if the goal is to educate about the structure and properties of galaxies? In that case, then the stereoscopic galaxy is not a lie because the 3D nature of the galaxy is real. That is, the galaxy would definitely look like that from a specific viewing angle in the Universe. It's just not a viewing angle we'd ever be able to see ourselves. The spatial properties of the central bulge, the flat disc, the orbiting globular clusters, etc. They all exist. They were not created for the film. So, for me as a learning scientists, if what you see exists in reality then it's game.

After the discussion we saw a new 3D IMAX film by National Geographic called Flying Monsters, narrated and written by Sir Richard Attenborough. I thought it was pretty good and effective at teaching a light lesson on evolution. Some of the stereo was very nice, but some of it was way too strong and ghosting was bad (I was in the sweet spot of the theater too). I REALLY hate the opening shot, which is a super stereo animation of the National Geographic logo. It almost caused me to throw off my glasses and is a classic example of why you should ease people into the 3D, not throw them into it to get a cheap thrill. It sucks that this will apparently be at the start of every National Geographic 3D film made.

Study #1 at a Glance

2011-09-19T23:28:00.001-04:00

Our research consists primarily of two main studies.

The first is an experimental study involving a few hundred children at the Living Laboratory in the Museum of Science, Boston. The LL is a neat space. It is setup for cognitive researchers to conduct small-scale experiments with children in the presence of their parents. The researcher is required to be present and must explain their research to the parent while the child is occupied by the experiment. The goal of the LL is to educate the public as to how scientific research is done – and what better way than to show them an authentic experiment underway in front of their own eyes?

I am going to setup an Alioscopy stereoscopic display of around 22”. This is a glasses-free display running on an OS X computer. We will write a slide show program (in java) that will randomly show the child 2D and 3D slides of highly spatial scientific objects (clouds, mountains, crystals, etc.). We will give them an iPad to answer questions about spatial properties of the slides. Questions may be like “which tree is further, the black or brown one?” or “how many clouds do you see in this picture?” The last item will be a drawing task where we ask them to draw something they saw from memory using their fingers. This item will be graded not by accuracy but by the number of spatial elements they include.

Before the slide show begins, they will be given 5-10 spatial cognition questions to help establish a rough measure of prior spatial ability. We will be using items from previously published tests that involve tasks like mentally folding pieces of paper.

While the experiment is underway, I will talk to the parents and will ask them about how much experience their child may have with computers, video games and 3D videos.

We will be looking mainly at differences in accuracy between the 2D and 3D visualizations. We’ll use ANCOVAs to see if any differences are related to prior spatial ability, gender or age. This is a relatively straightforward experimental design (which is the way I like it for early studies!). We will pilot test it this summer and there may be a lot of changes, so this is all in flux. We hope to begin taking data next fall for a 3-month period. If you are in Boston – stop by!

I’ll describe the 2nd study in the follow up post. It’s the sexier of the two since it involves making High-Definition stereoscopic movies. ☺

Full Speed Ahead

2011-08-31T23:21:00.003-04:00

It is done. The NSF has formally awarded us the grant to conduct our research. The "Two Eyes, 3D" project involves two studies: one with children at the Boston Museum of Science and another with adults at the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum in Chicago. In the coming weeks I'll describe the preliminary research design for both studies and begin summarizing some background literature on stereoscopy and spatial cognition.

The goal of this blog is to shed light on the research process so I hope to describe all the steps along the way - good and bad. It will be something of a sounding board of ideas, some of which will surely be poor and (hopefully) tossed aside over time. But some will likely work out and end up telling us something new about how stereoscopy can be used to teach highly spatial scientific concepts (or not).

The grant runs for 3 years, so I hope we are all around on its last day September 30, 2014. This should be a fun ride!

jumping to conclusions

2011-08-19T23:34:00.009-04:00

There has been a lot of news in the last couple of weeks about a research study that found 3D movies do not enhance enjoyment, cause stress-related physical strain and do not help memory. But let's take a closer look before jumping to the conclusion that 3D in movies sucks.

First, the study was presented at an industry conference and has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal. That doesn't mean it is poor, just that it has not been checked out and, more importantly, it means we don't have the details of the study. All have is what was reported to the media at the conference. I'll quote this article:

Carrier and colleagues had 400 students watch one of three movies in either 2-D or 3-D: "Alice in Wonderland," "Clash of the Titans" or "How to Train Your Dragon."

After viewing the film, participants went home and completed an online survey. They were asked to rate how realistic the movie was to them and to report emotions and sensations they experienced, which they selected from a list of 60 words. The words ranged from mild emotions, such as "enjoyment," to more intense ones, including "anger" and "rage." Participants were also quizzed on their knowledge of the film.

The survey showed that neither group remembered the movie better than the other. It also showed that 3-D movie-watchers did not experience a greater sense of immersion in the movie's world, nor did they pay more attention to the film or report experiencing more intense emotions.

I have a number of beefs. First of all, self reported studies always should be taken with a grain of salt. Sometimes in psychology that is all you have because studying the human brain (emotions, etc.) is quite difficult. But such research design is not very sensitive, mainly because there is no zero point. That is the subjects are not on the same scale. For example, what "anger" means to one person is different than it means to someone else. Thus, the difference between "anger" and "rage" can be different between people. Secondly, the sample sizes are small. You have 400 people divided into two groups, with each group divided into 3, thus you have about 65-70 people per film per condition. Unless the results were very strong, I doubt it would be statistically significant. Again, we'll be able to check for all this if the paper is published (a high percentage of conference presentations never make it to publication - I'd put it at around 50%). Third, how can one judge whether a cartoon (such as How to Train Your Dragon) is more realistic in 2D or 3D?

I could go on and on but will stop because it is somewhat unfair to criticize research at a presentation I did not attend. But it was publicly released and the authors have made free with the media, so it is fair to ask questions.

The authors say: ""It didn’t seem to enhance your memory at all," Carrier said. "That’s an unfortunate implication."

Again, how did they determine that? Without an experimental study I just don't see how they can say that based on the study design described in the press reports. In science the importance of a claim needs to be correlated with the strength of your evidence (as Carl Sagan said: "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence").

I'm not a 3D champion. My first published study on this subject actually agrees with their core result! In my experience, 3D increased cognitive load and did not have any effect on accuracy of spatial cognition tasks I gave the subjects. And I buy the argument that 3D may not increase enjoyment of a film. Anecdotally I think audiences are starting to show that. And I think this study adds a new data point to the scholarly pool. But I think it's a minor data point and it does not mean what the press says it means. The evidence is not enough to say that 3D increases discomfort and does not affect memory. Not yet.

Rebirth

2011-08-06T01:27:00.004-04:00

So a lot has happened in the 2.5 years since my last post. The silence was caused mainly by my dissertation topic changing to something that has nothing to do with stereoscopy. But I'm now done with that, have graduated, had a child and received a promotion at work. But stereoscopy never left my mind or heart. And I also recently got an NSF award to spend the next 3 years doing research on stereoscopy in museum settings. More on that later...

2.5 years may not seem like a long time. But in the world of consumer electronics it is an eternity. Read some of these old blog posts. They mention "an upcoming movie called Avatar". Who knew that it would go on to become the highest grossing film of all time? Now 3D is everywhere. But mostly it's not very good.

That first stereoscopy research paper was published in the meantime. And I did some pilot work on my original dissertation topic. I'll share that research here as well. Stay tuned!

superbowl

2009-01-30T21:08:00.002-05:00

Details on the 3D superbowl ad via Time.com

3-D is the new green

2009-01-27T22:45:00.005-05:00

Some short cuts:
I was at Target this week trying to decide between the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Cowab unga Carl Van and the $200 book about Calculus when I stumbled across the gem on the right. An actual 3D t-shirt. At least, I think it is. I'm not quite sure. The tag didn't say anything on it other than something about green, as in the cliche "eco-green" every marketer is going crazy about these days. I wish I had a pair of anaglyphs on me to check it out. Happily, I did have el iPhone, hence the pic. Click to embiggen.

There will be a 3-D anaglyph commercial during the superbowl this Sunday, I think during the first quarter. I have yet to see the LifeWater displays where you can get the glasses, though. From the screen shot it seems to be well designed so that you can "enjoy" the commercial sans glasses.

And, finally, the first 3-D movie that I actually think will treat 3-D as art instead of a gimmick. Coming in March.

While continuing to edit my first stereoscopic paper, I found a reference that claimed stereoscopy increased performance at the beginning of a learning task rather than towards the end. The theory is that it is good for giving a general overview of material/structure, but is not so good for detail. If true, then it would agree with my application of cognitive load theory. But it was just one paper and one study. I may play around with it in my piot study this spring to see if there is something to it.

First research results

2009-01-14T00:37:00.003-05:00

About a year ago I ran my first research study as part of my program here at Tufts. I spent a week at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago giving middle school aged kids spatial tests using their GeoWall. I'm presenting the results at NARST this April and will submit a paper to a journal soon. But I'll summarize it here, because the results were not what I expected.

Basically, I gave the kids 3 spatial tasks to complete, all taken from existing literature. One was completely 2D in nature (a letter rotation task). One involved a single 3D mental manipulation (block rotation task). And one involved lots of 3D mental manipulations (a paper folding task).
The students took one version of the three tasks presented on pieces of paper. Then they were given the same tasks, in a different order, via the stereoscopic GeoWall. I recorded accuracy, time on task and a short post-task interview.

My hypothesis was that the GeoWall would have no effect on the 2D task, a little effect on the moderate 3D task and a larger effect on the multiple 3D task. I thought the stereoscopic presentation would make it easier for the students to "see" the objects as 3D and therefore make 3D manipulations.

Wrong! Results show that there was no change in accuracy on any of the tasks between the paper and the stereoscopic presentations. (Note that no change means just that, not only did it not improve but accuracy didn't drop either.) However, completion time was affected by the difference in presentation formats. For the 2D task, there was no difference in time on task. For the moderate 3D task there was a moderate, but statistically significant, increase in completion time for the stereoscopic format. For the larger 3D task there was an even larger increase in completion time. In other words, completion time increased in line with the 3D nature of the task.

What does this mean? It means my hypothesis was waaaaayyyy off! The stereoscopic projection had no affect on accuracy and actually SLOWED the time it took to complete the task. Using cognitive theory and data from the interviews, I interpret that as meaning there is an increase in cognitive load when students use the stereoscopic system. Specifically, I think the kids are still thinking in 2D even when presented with a stereoscopic presentation. So their mind is taking the stereoscopic object, converting it to 2D and then RECONVERTING it to a 3D mental model.

If so, there are some things I may be able to do to resolve this. One, use cue theory to build in more depth cues into the image (i.e. make it more realistic). Two, give the students more training time to get used to the stereoscopic environment. I hope to do that in a small pilot study this spring at a local middle school.

Of course there are lots of details of this study I'm leaving out. My paper currently sits at 28 pages, not counting tables and figures. :) If you want more detail, wait for the NARST presentation or publication in a journal. Or e-mail me. :)

An OS X GeoWall

2009-01-01T23:29:00.006-05:00

This is a description of the 3D toys I setup in my office at Tufts. I use this for development of stereoscopic visuals. The entire setup cost almost exactly $5,000. It was funded by a small faculty support grant that my advisor and I applied for at Tufts.

The system:
MacPro 2 x 2.66GHz w/2GB RAM and 2 NVidia GForce 7300GT
OS X Leopard
MacAlly iShock FFB Controller
2 x inFocus IN26 projectors
30 plastic glasses, a silver screen and two 5" polarizing filters from Berezin Stereo (I found them pleasant to work with)

For a stacker, I bought a $20 adjustable wire frame cabinet from Target. And I needed an additional DVI->VGA converter from Office Max for $25. I also have setup a small table top fan (which I had extra) to blow on the front of the projectors. I attach the filters to the front of the cabinet with clothes pins that used to hold up a paper airplane in the office.

For software, I'm using Art of Illusion for my 3D modeling needs, Quantaga for my VRML needs, GIMP for illustration/drawing, and "viewer" to display the stereo pairs. All is freeware.

The nice part of the setup is that it is largely open source and is semi-portable. I mean semi in that you do need to be in some type of decent shape, but otherwise it's easy to move around. This spring I plan to bring it into a middle school classroom for a few days. That will be the big test. Can it withstand the jostling of tweens?

This setup was based on the excellent GeoWall concept, introduced to me by the fine folk at the Adler Planetarium Space Visualization Laboratory.

"Did I tell you it can also travel in time?"

2008-12-19T22:55:00.004-05:00

I am in the midst of catching up on the awesome revival of the Dr. Who series. Tonight I finished the last ep of season 2 and was quite amused to learn that 3D anaglyph glasses will let you see the deas ex machina of the week - pieces of "nothingness" that surround people. I think this image should be our new logo.

I was also surfing the Internet at work today while waiting for an InDesign CS install to fail for the third time in a row when I ran across this at the BBC: Sky Moves to 3D Broadcasts. Apparently when one starts a stereoscopic blog, it's a bit like buying a new car. Suddenly you see the new model all over the road.

The story takes what I said about 3D on television and advances it a few years. Apparently they are testing it now and, as we predicted, on sports. They only tested it on a small audience and they used polarized glasses. That means either 1. they had two projectors inside the TV throwing the image on a single screen or 2. they have a new screen technology that does polarization in a new fashion - perhaps with interlaced pixels. In any event, if they spent money on setting up equipment at a stadium, then they must be close to making it happen.

So far the first few entries of this nascent blog has been mainly about business. I promise to get into the research and technology aspect soon. It's just that I underestimated how quickly the consumer electronics companies are moving on this!

Hollywood directors fighting over their toys

2008-12-13T00:25:00.004-05:00

While in the throws of a Wikipedia bender, I stumbled across an interesting debate between two visionary directors: James Cameron and Tim Burton. Cameron is filming his first post-Titanic fiction movie in 3D. It's a sci-fi shoot-em-up called Avatar. Burton is filming his next big movie, an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass. Both are planning to release the movies in 3D.

In my last post I mentioned how easy it is to take 3D animation and re-render it into a 3D movie. Both of these movies are going to include heavy use of CGI (animation), all of which can be re-rendered. However, what about the live actors?

Cameron is doing it the traditional way: by filming the actors from two viewing angles. Burton is going to film in 2D and use computer gimmickry to try and recreate a 2nd viewing angle. Traditionalists call this cheating. Burton's producer sez that if you can't tell, who cares? He scores a point there. It's all about fantasy, anyway. But can the technology truly pull it off?

Cameron also goes on to attack the DVD releases using the blue-red anaglyph glasses. I'll explain soon why that is considered low quality, but is thus far the only option available.

Hollywood power plays and gossip about 3D technology? Stereoscopy has arrived.

The bizness of 3D

2008-12-11T23:36:00.005-05:00

In a future post I'll cover how I managed to wander into the stereoscopy field. For now I want to talk about one of the reasons why I decided to make it a major focus of my academic research: business.

In my opinion, stereoscopic projection is the next HD. In 10-20 years most TVs will support it. The reason? Hannah Montana and Joe Theisman.

I am not a father (yet), so I haven't been indoctrinated into the phenomenon that is Miley Cyrus. However, her father Billy Ray hit it big when I was in high school so I remember him well. In particular, I remember seeing a triple bill concert where he was the last "headliner" act. Everyone walked out after the second act. But apparently he had enough talent to co-spawn Miley.

Her last movie, Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds was a stereoscopic/3D movie. It made $70 million (worldwide theatre revenue) on a $7 million budget. That's enough to make even the most blockheaded Hollywood exec sit up and take notice. It was shown in theatres using polarized glasses (the DVD uses red/blue anaglyphs).

Disney's right hand was aparrently aware of what the left hand was doing. Their Pixar division learned from this and decided that all future movies will be released in 3D. Dreamworks soon followed suit. This makes natural sense. Once a 3D animated movie has been produced, it takes very little additional effort to re-render the same movie from a slightly different camera angle. I have no knowledge of this, but my guess is that it would cost about 1% of the overall budget of the movie. With two versions of the movie that differ only by a slight camera angle, you have an easy 3D film. This is why concert movies are also popular in 3D (U2 did it recently too). The concert occurs on a single stage, so it is easy to setup multiple camera angles.

What else occurs on a single, fixed stage surrounded by cameras? Sports. There is a reason digital/satellite/HD technologies all embraced sports first. The avid sports fan is, well, a fanatic. They will pay big bucks as early adopters to get their fix bigger and badder than before. Samsung, Hyundai, Philips and other television manufacturers are quickly rolling out competing stereoscopic technologies. How much do you want to bet that they will be cutting deals with the major sports as their major content generators?

That makes me think to a defining moment of my sports life. When I was ten I watched Joe Theisman suffer a compound fracture of his leg on national TV. It was a sick moment. Now imagine it in stereo.

Hello, world

2008-12-03T00:00:00.005-05:00

Hey, all. Welcome to the obligatory intro post. I am a 3rd year science education PhD student at Tufts University. My main research interest is spatial cognition - specifically how to make representations of highly spatial scientific objects and concepts more accessible to students regardless of their innate spatial ability. Congrats if you made it through that. I'll try to keep the gibberish to a minimum in the future. But I may need your help to call me out on it.

Anyway, I think using stereoscopic representations in the classroom has some potential to help me in my quest. However, there is very little rigorous and empirical data on the use of stereoscopy in formal educational settings. And there are enough curve balls regarding stereoscopy do give us pause. Is it the real deal? Or is it just another technological flash in the pan?

While I intend this largely to be an academic blog, I want it to make sense. (Sometimes those are mutually exclusive.) So call me out if it gets wordy or, worse, boring! I do have some experience at this blog thing. I've had a personal blog at LiveJournal since February, 2001 and I started the Slacker Astronomy blog and podcast - which is now run by two very close friends who are eminently more capable than I.

Goals of this blog:

Cover new stereoscopy research
Report on my own research
Pontificate about my navel
Cover the business of stereoscopy (which is about to be huge)
Be entertaining - or, at least, if I fail at that, to help you sleep.

Stereoscopy, by my definition, is the use of cues to create a sense of depth in an image. Most people experience this by using "3D glasses" in a movie theater. It's been around since 1858. But only now has the technology progressed to make it affordable and flexible enough for use in the everyday classroom. Heck, soon it's coming to a TV near you. And if I can figure this blogger interface out, I'll cover it for you.