Dominium Irrealis: Pokescope

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Pokescope

Coming back to the topic of stereo photography, a few months ago I realized how tired I have become of anaglyphic images. What I’ve always found lacking in anaglyphs is the diversity of colours one can find in 2D photography. It is a fact after all that the method of applying cyan and red shades to the image has a tendency of degrading or even taking away certain colours and making the whole picture look dimmer. I am among persons who enjoy monochrome photography, but when it comes to colour photography, I prefer to be able to enjoy the whole spectrum of colours.

Several weeks ago the postman delivered to me this strange box you can see above. I ordered it from a Polish online shop with stereoscopic equipment (Stereos).

In Stereo World Magazine, Vol 27, No 4. you can find the following words about this curious 3D viewer:

"... for the quick fusion of nearly any format pair --or several pairs at once-- the PokeScope is one of the best designed and crafted devices ever to reach the market."

What possible effect can you achieve with a small black box with two glass prisms, which measures 2" x 2" x 1.3"? Someone must be a bit overenthusiastic. But why not open it and see how this thing works.

Hmmm, looks rather cool, uh? Now not only it is a strange black box, but one hell of a gimmick! Rather fishy, I remember telling myself. But, imagine how impressed I was when I viewed a few of my old stereo pairs in their full glory, the whole spectrum of colours just the way it is in real life!

And this is not the end. The most stunning feature of Pokecope is that it can be used for pictures much bigger than your computer screen. You can, for instance, project your stereo pair onto your wall and adjust Pokescope to these larger dimensions. Someone who came up with the idea of constructing this device has done a great favour to the art of stereo photography and, perhaps it is only a dream, but it would be wonderful to see it receive as much attention as it’s stereoscopic predecessors.

I will now have to be careful not to get too distracted. Apart from undertaking the task of reproducing all of my “double shots” into vertical stereo pairs (the best result you can get from using this method is with vertical images) - a task quite time-consuming, which will take me a year or so to complete – I have started collecting antique stereo views scattered throughout the internet (I will say more about them in my next post). What a terrible compulsion! I sometimes feel like screaming: Eureka! Pokescope!

Labels: Stereoscopy

posted by Slawek @ 7:05 AM

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