RG Specs

3D movies have actually been around a lot longer than widescreen ones. Almost as soon as the early still cameras were invented, it was realised that they could easily be adapted to produce a stereoscopic image. Indeed, as early as 1856, J. C. d’Almeida gave a demonstration at the Academie des Sciences in which two stereoscopic images (that is to say two views of the same scene, photographed from slightly differing points of view – usually around two and a half inches – representing the distance between a pair of human eyes) were projected in rapid succession as lantern slides coloured red and green, with the audience viewing the screen through spectacles fitted with red and green lenses (This system of rapidly alternating left and right eye views would be used again – but not for more than a hundred years! We’ll come to that later). The green image could only be seen through the red lens and the red image only through the green one, effectively sending two slightly different images of the same scene to the brain of the viewer, where they would be combined to form a three-dimensional image. Nevertheless, in spite of this remarkable discovery, for most people in the Victorian age their only experience of viewing 3D images would be via one or the other of the two most popular types of stereoscope in use at the time; the Holmes or the Brewster.

via Wide Screen Movies Magazine.