Discovering ChromaDepth and 3D Art

While at Mountain Music Festival a couple of years ago as a visual artist, I left my blacklight tent to enjoy my favorite band for a few songs. A friend handed me a pair of ChromaDepth glasses and said “Check out the lighting with these!” I put them on and saw some interesting 3D effects based on the color of lights that were being used which I thought was pretty cool. I handed them back, and he said “Keep them!” I put them in my front pocket and shortly later headed back to my art tent.

As I entered my tent, with no one around, I felt the glasses in my pocket and put them on to look at my art. I let out a “holy shiiiiiit” as I saw that my art had come to life; it was jumping off the canvases in full 3D effect!

I shared my discovery with everyone who entered the art tent for the remainder of the festival and they had the same experience and type of response as I had! I knew I had to invest in learning more about how it work. What I knew for sure was that warm colors (red, orange, yellow) came towards me, and cool colors (blue, green, purple) were further away.

When I got home, I put a swath of each color of my paints on a canvas and proceeded to order the paints in my pallet by the warmest to coolest. Then I proceeded to lay out a test canvas with the intention of controlling the design with a 3D effect, I layed out a hallway design and painted it. It worked exactly as I had planned! I now knew that I could purposfully create 3D art with effects that would pull a view in to a new space.

See painting below…

I found a supplier of the ChromaDepth glasses and ordered 50 pair. I started creating more 3D art and the response to it was wonderful. But I was often asked, “How does it work?” All I knew was how the colors reacted, not WHY they reacted as they did with the glasses on. I was asked again this week twice so I decided to do the research. Here is what I’ve learned:

The effect of 3D with the glasses is called “Chromostereoscopy” and is like stereo music, but for your eyes. The branded glasses are called ChromaDepth®

ChromaDepth is a 3-D viewing technology created by Chromatek (now American Paper Optics). The glasses are fitted with a thin prism-like holographic film and the lenses are oriented sideways, so the overall bending effect looks like parts of the scene have been shifted horizontally inwards (ie, towards the center of your nose). The red hues are shifted more than the greens and the greens are shifted more than the blues. Thus, red elements in the 3D scene appear to converge closest to the viewer and the blue elements appear to converge the farthest away.

This technology is used a lot, for example with creating 3D representations for topography on maps! Note that 3D has been around long before ChromaDepth! Did you have a ViewMaster as a child? Recall KodaChome?

Death Valley Earthquake Fault

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscopy
https://jaredjared.com/chroma.html
https://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~mjb/chromadepth/