Stereoscopic Images in Unity3D

Screenshot of Unity3D showing stereoscopic images

At Konstellation Labs we love 3D – and we are constantly exploring new ways of using 3D – especially on the web. Papervision3D and other flash 3D libs are nice, but we really want to push all our 3D processing from the CPU to the GPU to max out performance. Our favorite 3D game engine is Unity3D and it not just because Unity is based in Copenhagen just like us… Besides being a cool game engine Unity3D makes it easy to make small and large scale 3D creations and run them in the browser using all the new features of modern 3D hardware.

We love 3D but what we love even more is silly 3D glasses – especially red/blue colored ones from the fifties. In this experiment we tried implementing a stereoscopic camera in Unity3D and we think it turned out pretty well. The component renderes two images – one for each eye (left/right) shifted in 3D space.

The trick in making the final anaglypth image for red/blue glasses is to combine the two images, taking only the red-channel from the left eye image and the green/blue-channels from the right eye image and combining the two into the final on-screen image.

You can try out our prototype below – use right-click to toggle fullscreen and arrow keys to move camera. Have fun!

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