San Francisco — It seems that Google still grants its employees play with their 20% time, as over the weekend its video sharing web site YouTube began experimenting with a three dimensional video.
"YouTubePete," the Googler behind this project, confirmed this in a YouTube forum thread that he has been working on making a stereoscopic player during his "20 percent time" at Google.
He stated that "it is currently very early, hence the silly bugs like swapping the eyes for the anaglyph modes." Peter also shared the various ways to view such videos:
- yt3d:enable=true Enables the view mode.
- yt3d:aspect=3:4 Sets the aspect of the encoded video.
- yt3d:swap=true Swaps the left and right sources. You may need to add this to videos when the player with fixed anaglyph modes ships. Apologies for the inconvineince.[sic]
- yt3d:left=0_0.1_0.5_0.9 and yt3d:right=0.5_0.1_1_0.9 These tags are very provisional and most useful for fixing up old videos. They set the source area for each eye as pairs of coordinates x1_y1_x2_y2. The scale of these coordinates is 0,0 for the the top left down to 1,1 for the bottom right.
A sample video, which was tracked by SearchEngineRoundtable.com, can be viewed below.
Well, it seems pretty cool that this is being done and, is this just another Googler’s recreational project without a practical application, or is there truly a future in 3D video marketing?