Jozef Chúťka's blog

Pixel Bender and displacement maps were so much fun to develop that my next experiment led me to create some more advanced effects. Do you know anaglyphs? Anaglyph images are used to provide a stereoscopic 3D effect, when viewed with 2 color glasses. There are multiple types of glasses (colors), but the most comon is red-cyan combination. So, I have created this simple pixel bender kernel that makes anaglyph images based on original image and its depth map (just like those used in displacement maps)

Take on your red cyan glasses and lets see the result:

I have been asked to make it also work for other types of glasses, so I made left/right glass matrices dynamic, now you can define any values you like (based on your glass color). The default matrices are:

shader.data.matrixLeft = [0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.7, 0.0, 0.0, 0.3, 0.0, 0.0];
shader.data.matrixRight = [0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0];

… these values are taken from optimized method for red cyan combination. There are some more for this color combination.

There is also the zBase parameter that takes values from 0.0 to 1.0. Defaul value is 0.5. With 0.0, the scene appears to be in front of monitor, with 1.0 depth goes behind the monitor. With 0.5 closer objects appears to be before monitor, distatnt ones behind:

shader.data.zBase = [0.5];

Take care so your head will not explode Download pixel bender kernel (.pbk) file for anaglyphs here.

Where to go from here:

• Anaglyph image
• Anaglyph Methods Comparison
• Matrices and Pixel Bender