Posted 04/05/2012 | by Brad Chacos



Good news for 3D monitor owners: now, you can watch Gabriel Iglesias and the Epic Meal Time guys shove a Bacon-weave and McNugget-covered cake in their faces and feel like you are right in the room with them! How, you ask? With a little love from Google! Starting today, any short-form 1080p video found on YouTube can be converted to 3D on the fly.

If you've got a compatible setup, transmogrifying high-def YouTube content into 3D is as easy as can be: just select the quality settings icon in the video's control bar -- it looks like a gear -- and select 3D Viewing. Presto change-o!

Googlers Deb Mukherjee and Chen Wu explain the magic behind the curtain on the YouTube blog. The process uses the following steps, combined with a dash of "cloud computing scalability:"

We use a combination of video characteristics such as color, spatial layout and motion to estimate a depth map for each frame of a monoscopic video sequence
We use machine learning from the growing number of true 3D videos on YouTube to learn video depth characteristics and apply them in depth estimation
The generated depth map and the original monoscopic frame create a stereo 3D left-right pair, that a stereo display system needs to display a video as 3D

It's a nifty feature to be sure, but we're not sure how many people it will reach. How many people even have a 3D-capable setup? Do you?