6/9/21: Traffic Experiment #1
🎥 cross
🎥 parallel
🎥 anaglyph
A new 3D experiment: traffic in 3D, part 1! Notice the moving vehicles appear to float above the street. The faster they move, the farther up they levitate: the stopped cars at the beginning appear grounded and flat, and the motorcycles weaving in between lanes float the highest of all! I think it’s really neat to see at a (fused) glance, in an intuitive way, which vehicles are moving relatively faster and slower. This could be used in human-supervised aerial traffic monitoring, perhaps more effectively than standard displays that superimpose numbers along each vehicle.

This is a simple 2D stationary drone video (original video by Tom Fisk) duplicated with a time offset. So the stereopair depth effects come not from the motion of the camera, but from the motion of the vehicles themselves. Their speed translates to visible depth because speed is just displacement over time, and in this case, horizontal displacement—which we know also determines perceived depth in a stereopair. So the greater the speed of the car, the more it changes position between the L & R here, and the greater its difference in depth from the stationary roadway is.

This was inspired by a conversation I had with @swan.collective on Instagram about stationary camera stereopairs, in which moving objects create their own depth effects (like clouds, stuff on the surface of moving water, etc.). It made me consider things that move at different rates but only along one axis, and I thought of stop-and-go traffic jams! I couldn’t find quite the right video of that, but found several related ones I will share.

After posting this in IG, it has become clear that the number one response it elicits in presumably Generation X people is: FROGGER! More in this series to come—stay tuned…

TAGS: experiments > traffic; vehicles > cars, motorcycles, trucks

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