We have heard alot that we live in 3D world or some movie is in 3D or many of those 3D words and lines. But have we ever tried understanding what does it really mean?
I came across an article which gave a very good explanation on all this and I added a bit of my college knowledge to it and came up with this article. It will definitely answer many of the questions you ever wanted to know but never tried knowing them.
Consider you have a friend who lives on moon, and he wants to send you a gift on your birthday present. He ask you about your residence on earth. The only problem is that the courier service on moon doesnot understand the alphabetical address, rather it only understand the numerical co-ordinates. So how do you send him your position on earth?
You send him three pair of co-ordinates. The first one is called longitude , the second one is called latitude, and the third one is called altitude.
These three co-ordinates define your position on the earth. The first two defines your location , and the third one defines your height above the sea level.
So that means that only three co-ordinates are required to define your position on earth. That means you live in world which is 3 dimensional. And thus this not only answers the question about dimension , but also answers the reason , that why we live in a 3d world.
So if we live in the 3d world , means a 3 dimensional world, then what are the dimensions of an image that we capture. An image is a two dimensional, thats why we also define an image as a 2 dimensional signal. An image has only height and width.
But our eye is able to perceive three dimensional objects .
How does television works?
-------------------------------------
If we look at any image , we will see that they are a two dimensional image. In order to convert it into three dimension , we need one other dimension. Lets take time as the third dimension , in that case we will move these two dimensional image over the third dimension time. The same concept that happens in television, that helps us perceive the depth of different objects on a screen. Does that mean that what comes on the T.V or what we see in the television screen is 3d. Well we can yes. The reason is that, in case of T.V we if we are playing a video. Then a video is nothing else but two dimensional pictures move over time dimension. As two dimensional objects are moving over the third dimension which is a time so we can say it is 3 dimensional.
The mathematical representation of three dimensional signal is:
F(x,y,z) = animated character.
Another axis or dimension Z is involved in a three dimension, that gives the illusion of depth.
Mathematically a four d signal can be stated as:
F(x,y,z,t) = animated movie.
The common example of a 4 dimensional signal can be an animated 3d movie. As each character is a 3d character and then they are moved with respect to the time, due to which we saw an illusion of a three dimensional movie more like a real world.
So that means that in reality the animated movies are 4 dimensional i-e: movement of 3d characters over the fourth dimension time.
