Mona Lisa Smile: Did Leonardo da Vinci create the first 3D image?
Source: techtimes.com
Experts have found evidence hinting that Leonardo da Vinci, famed Renaissance man, may have been the father of 3D stereoscopy. If proven, da Vinci may have another achievement to add to his long and illustrious career as an artist, scientist and engineer.
After comparing the world famous Mona Lisa to a different painting that was originally thought to be something like a "knock-off," scientists have found evidence showing that the Mona Lisa may be part of a pair of paintings. Put together, the two paintings may form the world’s first stereoscopic 3D painting.
Back in 2012, scientists began investigating a different painting of the Mona Lisa housed in a museum in Madrid. Upon closer inspection, the experts found an exquisite rendition of the Mona Lisa underneath a layer of black paint. The investigators found that the painting underneath the black paint was actually remarkably similar to the original Mona Lisa housed in the Louvre. The second painting featured the same woman painting in front of the same background. Due to the similarities between the two, the researchers speculated that the second painting was the work of da Vinci or one of the his protégés.
Da Vinci may have painted the world’s first stereoscopic image. Researchers have found that two existing paintings of the Mona Lisa were painted with slightly different perspectives.
"In case of the Mona Lisa, a quite exceptional, rediscovered studio copy was presented to the public in 2012 by the Prado Museum in Madrid," said Claus-Christian Carbon and Vera Hesslinger in a study published back in 2013. "Not only does it mirror its famous counterpart superficially; it also features the very same corrections to the lower layers, which indicates that da Vinci and the ’copyist’ must have elaborated their panels simultaneously." Carbon and Hesslinger are researchers from the University of Bamberg and the University of Mainz respectively.
After comparing both paintings side by side, the researchers noted a surprising detail. Each of the paintings was painted from a slightly different perspective.
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A 3-D image, or red-cyan anaglyph, of the hands region of da Vinci’s "Mona Lisa" painting and the version in the Prado museum.
Stereopsis was first explained by Charles Wheatstone in 1838: “… the mind perceives an object of three dimensions by means of the two dissimilar pictures projected by it on the two retinæ …”.[12] He recognized that because each eye views the visual world from slightly different horizontal positions, each eye’s image differs from the other. Objects at different distances from the eyes project images in the two eyes that differ in their horizontal positions, giving the depth cue of horizontal disparity, also known as retinal disparity and as binocular disparity. Wheatstone showed that this was an effective depth cue by creating the illusion of depth from flat pictures that differed only in horizontal disparity. To display his pictures separately to the two eyes, Wheatstone invented the stereoscope.
Leonardo da Vinci had also realized that objects at different distances from the eyes project images in the two eyes that differ in their horizontal positions, but had concluded only that this made it impossible for a painter to portray a realistic depiction of the depth in a scene from a single canvas.
Leonardo chose for his near object a column with a circular cross section and for his far object a flat wall. Had he chosen any other near object, he might have discovered horizontal disparity of its features. His column was one of the few objects that projects identical images of itself in the two eyes.
Stereoscopy became popular during Victorian times with the invention of the prism stereoscope by David Brewster. This, combined with photography, meant that tens of thousands of stereograms were produced.
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