YouTube 3D Videos

3D videos are fun to watch, but experiencing 3D videos have been mostly isolated to theatres till now. The popular video sharing website  is experimenting with 3D videos, which will allow users to view videos in 3D on their PCs using a stereoscopic player.

Visiting this experimental video on YouTube, shows users additional options that are not usually associated with YouTube videos.

The additional options allow users to change the 3D view style and view the video, the changes are applied instantly without breaking the viewing experience.

There are several tags available to create 3D videos for YouTube, which include;

  • yt3d:enable=true Enables the view mode.
  • yt3d:aspect=3:4 Sets the aspect of the encoded video.
  • yt3d:swap=true Swaps the left and right sources. You may need to add this to videos when the player with fixed anaglyph modes ships.
  • yt3d:left=0_0.1_0.5_0.9 and yt3d:right=0.5_0.1_1_0.9 These tags are very provisional and most useful for fixing up old videos. They set the source area for each eye as pairs of coordinates x1_y1_x2_y2. The scale of these coordinates is 0,0 for the the top left down to 1,1 for the bottom right.

This feature was developed by a Google employee as his 20% project, and was spotted by Search Engine Roundtable in a YouTube Help forum topic.

What do you think of this new feature? Do let us know.