YouTube now testing 3D stereoscopic video uploads

Google's 20% self-directed time rule is a wonderful thing -- it brought us Gmail, Google News, and AdSense, to name just a few. The latest toy to come out of a Googler's one-day-a-week personal project time is 3D stereoscopic videos in YouTube.

The concept is simple; upload a video that contains both the left eye and right eye frames side-by-side. To make your video viewable as in 3D, tag it with "yt3d:enable=true" as well as "yt3d:aspect=3:4", setting this one to the actual aspect ratio of your video.

The YT3D tag will enable a drop-down menu under your video that gives the viewer the option to view it using various 3D technologies, from Red / Cyan glasses to simple Parallel or Cross-eyed modes that don't require special glasses to view. The video is manipulated for each of these various viewing modes on the fly, so you can switch between instantly.

It seems likely that as consumer electronics companies look for ways to differentiate their products, we'll likely see stereoscopic video cameras in the not-too-distant future. So, what do you think? Cool new YouTube mode, or is 3D simply not all it's cracked up to be? Let us know in the comments.

[via Googling Google]

Tags: aspect ratio, aspect-ratio, AspectRatio, stereoscopic, stereoscopic video cameras, stereoscopic-video-cameras, StereoscopicVideoCameras, video, youtube, youtube-3d