bad vision by Bryan

Summer Motto #456-1A: Rock the free stuff, always.

So following that charge, my friends and I were able to score free tickets to the New England Aquarium to check out Sharks 3D.

There was a catch, of course.

Before watching the movie, we had to listen to a lecture given by the state shark biologist (forgive me for my miseducation but I did not know we had state shark biologists). He was talking about having to rescue a shark from a shallow area of water in the Cape Cod area. (public reminder to find link to news article)

The actual 3D movie was pretty cool. The narrator was a turtle named Norbert (actually, I don’t remember if he had a name, but Norbert is just a cool name as it is).

One thing I didn’t learn in 8.02 was how 3D glasses worked, so I decided to Google it.

HowStuffWorks.com had a pretty good explanation.

3-D Viewing
In a movie theater, the reason why you wear 3-D glasses is to feed different images into your eyes just like a View-Master does. The screen actually displays two images, and the glasses cause one of the images to enter one eye and the other to enter the other eye. There are two common systems for doing this:

Red/Green or Red/Blue
Although the red/green or red/blue system is now mainly used for television 3-D effects, and was used in many older 3-D movies. In this system, two images are displayed on the screen, one in red and the other in blue (or green). The filters on the glasses allow only one image to enter each eye, and your brain does the rest. You cannot really have a color movie when you are using color to provide the separation, so the image quality is not nearly as good as with the polarized system.

Polarization
At Disney World, Universal Studios and other 3-D venues, the preferred method uses polarized lenses because they allow color viewing. Two synchronized projectors project two respective views onto the screen, each with a different polarization. The glasses allow only one of the images into each eye because they contain lenses with different polarization.

The polarized glasses allow only one of the images into each eye because each lens has a different polarization.

After the movie, we walked around the area trying to find a Starbucks, and for the first time in my Boston experience, I walked around for 5 minutes and did not find one. Eventually we found one, but it was closed.

Alternative: Ice Cream, of course. To the Newbury Street JP Licks we went.

In completely unrelated news, there are only 6 days left of my summer vacation.