The Relation between Size Distortion and Shooting Conditions for Stereoscopic Images

Research on shooting methods of 3-D program production for natural and fatigue-free 3-D images is under way. Toed-in and parallel camera configurations are available for shooting 3-D programs. The former is usually used because shooting and viewing conditions can be easily set to get a desired 3-D design. It has been shown, however, that this camera configuration brings about the inconsistency between depth information by lens perspective and by binocular parallax, and that this inconsistency leads to the size distortion called the puppet theater effect. This effect describes the tendency of objects in 3-D images to look unnaturally small. On the contrary, the parallel camera configuration does not cause such inconsistency under the specific shooting and viewing conditions called the orthostereoscopic condition. The possibilities of representation in 3-D images using this method are discussed in this paper.