YouTube adds 3D viewing for all short 1080p videos, says 4D is around the corner (Videos)

Élyse Betters | Apr 5 2012 - 7:37 am PT

[youtube=http://youtu.be/9jGvCdthQso]

YouTube now automatically allows short 1080p videos to convert to 3D.

The video-sharing platform just announced on the official YouTube blog that it is expanding a beta feature released last year, which gives users the option to convert YouTube videos to 3D with just a click of a mouse. Since the beta launched, creators have converted hundreds of thousands of videos to 3D.

The popularity of the feature encouraged YouTube to implement 3D viewing in the Quality settings under the gear icon on the YouTube player.

“Then pop on your 3D glasses and see YouTube in another dimension (like the video above),” explained Technical Staffer Deb Mukherjee and Software Engineer Chen Wu in the blog post.

The Googlers even recommended watching “YouTube Rewind 2011” to get the full YouTube 3D experience (below).

YouTube’s blog post detailed how the conversion technology works. It employs a combination of video characteristics from color and spatial layout to motion and depth mapping for monoscopic video sequences. It also uses machine learning from previous 3D videos on YouTube to understand depth characteristics.

“With this broader knowledge of 3D conversion, we then apply cloud computing scalability to make conversion possible across even more videos on YouTube,” the Googlers contended. “Breaking up a video into tiny chunks of data and processing them in parallel on Google’s cloud infrastructure lets us process these videos, while still producing the quality you expect.”

YouTube also announced that 4D, 5D, and 6D videos are around the corner, and it offers a YouTube 3D Guide online for users interested in learning more.

“YouTube Rewind 2011”
[youtube=http://youtu.be/SmnkYyHQqNs]