In my last post, I described how to prepare your own 3D pictures for viewing on the Nintendo 3DS.  Of course, most of you probably don’t have your own 3D camera, so those steps aren’t terribly useful to you.  Most of you will want to put someone else’s 3D MPO files onto your 3DS.

Here’s a bunch of 3D pictures I’ve taken with my 3D camera, all packaged up and ready for your to put on your 3DS: Nintendo 3DS Picture Packs

Detailed instructions are available over there, but it’s basically open the ZIP file, copy the directory in the ZIP into the DCIM directory on an SD card, then stick the SD card in the 3DS and you’re ready to go.

Of course, if you want to put your own 2D pictures onto the 3DS, you can do pretty much the same thing.  The trickiest part is naming the images the right thing.  You have to put your images in a certain directory and name your images a certain way or the 3DS will get confused and refuse to show them.  I’m not exactly sure what the rules are, but I’ve had fairly good luck with the DCF Standard for naming files and folders.

Files: “CCCC####.jpg“, where C is an alphanumeric character (including “_”), and #### is a four digit number between “0001″ and “9999″.  “0000″ cannot be used.

Examples:

• Valid: ABCD1234.jpg, 12341234.jpg, HNI_0001.jpg, ZLDA6502.jpg, YOSE0032.jpg, IMG_1234.jpg
• Invalid: Picture.jpg, 3D.jpg, 1234ABCD.jpg, ABCD0000.jpg

Directories: “###CCCCC“, where C is an alphanumeric character (including “_”) and ### is a three digit number between “100″ and “999″.  “000″-”099″ cannot be used.

Examples:

• Valid: 123ABCDE, 12345678, 100NIN03, 128MARIO, 2600YOSE
• Invalid: Pictures, 3D, ABCDE123, 065ABCDE

If that naming doesn’t work, take a picture with the 3DS and mimic its file naming scheme exactly. 

It’s also important to notice that the 3DS software isn’t designed to be a general photo viewer of your own personal pictures.  It might not like your resolution, aspect ratio, bit depth, file size, camera type, subject matter, etc.  There may just simply be no way to get a particular picture to display properly on the device. I tried it with a 2.7MB 10 megapixel image taken with a Canon SX10 and it did display, although it was very slow to load.

Seriously, though, you’re much better off going over here and downloading some of my 3DS Picture Packs and looking at them.

So, the Nintendo 3DS has been out for a while now, and you’ve probably all been amazed by the glasses-free 3D screen ((As long as you’re DIRECTLY in front of it and the right distance away.)).  If you’re like me, your first thought after holding it was “Wow, the 3D camera on this thing sucks, I wonder how I can go about getting pictures from my twinned 7.1 MP Canon A570 CHDK/StereoDataMaker rig on this screen?”  Well, today, I bring you the answer.

First, you need to turn your 3D images into MPO files.  MPO is the relatively new defacto standard image type for 3D cameras.  It’s what the Fuji Real3D series used and what the 3DS uses.  As I understand it, MPO stands for “Multiple Picture O” ((The “O” is like David O Selznick’s middle initial:  It doesn’t stand for anything, it’s just there and no one really knows why.)), and the file is essentially just two JPEGs glued together.  This file format was created because apparently simply using a standard side-by-side JPEG format stereo pair that could be opened and viewed and edited by any image manipulation software package made since 1996 and that stereo enthusiasts have been using for years was just too limiting.  Anyway, the tool I’d recommend for converting your images to MPOs is Stereo Photo Maker.  SPM is a bundle of complete awesomeness in a zip file, and if you want to do anything involving 3D photography, you want SPM.  ((I’m not going to give instructions on using SPM if you haven’t already.  The tool is fairly easy to figure out and there are tons of how-tos on the site and elsewhere on the IntarWebz.  One point of advice:  Use the Auto-Align feature, which will do an amazing job of merging your pairs.))

This tool can do a lot of things, but one thing you’ll want it to do for you is resize the MPO images to 640×480.  Yeah, that’s tiny, but that’s the native resolution of the 3DS cameras, so it’s the size that the 3DS is used to dealing with.  The 3DS currently does not have any kind of zooming support, so even if you go with a higher resolution, it’s not going to do you any good at all.  All it’ll do is waste a lot of space on your SD card.  When you look at your pictures on the 3DS, everything will look just fine.

Anyway, once you’ve turned your traditional stereo pairs and turn them into these newfangled MPO files, you’ll quickly discover that you can’t actually see what’s in the file.  That’s because Windows doesn’t understand what an MPO file is, so it refuses to render thumbnails.  As always, someone on the Internet has already solved the problem for you:  This guy has created some registry files which tell Windows Explorer that .MPO files are really JPGs, so Windows Explorer will happily render thumbnails for you, and you’ll no longer be blind.

Okay, so, you’ve got a ton of MPO files, now you need to get them onto the 3DS to view them.  You have to put your images in a certain directory and name your images a certain way or the 3DS will get confused and refuse to show them.  I’m not exactly sure what the rules are, but I’ve had fairly good luck with the DCF Standard for naming files and folders.

Files: “CCCC####.mpo“, where C is an alphanumeric character (including “_”), and #### is a four digit number between “0001” and “9999”.  “0000” cannot be used.

Examples:

• Valid: ABCD1234.mpo, 12341234.mpo, HNI_0001.mpo, ZLDA6502.mpo, YOSE0032.mpo, IMG_1234.mpo
• Invalid: Picture.mpo, 3D.mpo, 1234ABCD.mpo, ABCD0000.mpo

Directories: “###CCCCC“, where C is an alphanumeric character (including “_”) and ### is a three digit number between “100” and “999”.  “000”-“099” cannot be used.

Examples:

• Valid: 123ABCDE, 12345678, 100NIN03, 128MARIO, 2600YOSE
• Invalid: Pictures, 3D, ABCDE123, 065ABCDE

If that naming doesn’t work, take a picture with the 3DS and mimic its file naming scheme exactly.

By now, you’ve given your files an approved name and stuck them in a directory with an approved name.  You’re almost there.  Take that directory and copy it to an SD card, under the “DCIM” folder.  I’d recommend using a spare SD card that you’re not afraid to wipe clean, rather than the card you typically use for the 3DS.  ((I’ve had to delete the phtcache.bin file somewhere under the “Nintendo 3DS” directory a couple of times to sort things out and force the system to refresh all of the pictures.  Plus, if anything goes wrong, you don’t want it going wrong on your main card.)) I’d do this step with just a handful of images to start with, just in case it doesn’t work the first time.  Your files should now be on the SD card, under a path similar this:  \DCIM\2600YOSE\IMG_1234.mpo.  Take that card, pop it into the 3DS, open up the Nintendo 3DS Camera app…

And wait.

And wait…

Every time I do this, the 3DS has to figure out what in the hell I’ve just done to it.  I think it’s reading the directory and producing thumbnail images or something like that.  I don’t really know what sort of craziness is going on behind the scenes, I just know that when you give it over a thousand files, it takes a while to get ready.  First, it’ll say “Preparing…”, then it will have to “Update the Management File”, and both of those stages can take upwards of several minutes to complete.  Just be patient and it’ll eventually work. 

(Or not…  Have I mentioned that everything you do with this information, you do at your own risk?  I haven’t had any problems with this, nor with the testing and exploring I did prior to finding something that worked, but that doesn’t mean you won’t run into issues that I didn’t have.  And if you do, those problems are between you and your local Nintendo Authorized Service Center.  If Nintendo had wanted us to put our own 3D images from other sources on the 3DS, they would have, you know, made it easy to do.  I make no claims as to the safety or accuracy of the method described above.)

Anyway, now you have your non-3DS images on the 3DS.  The first thing you’ll notice is how much the built in camera really does suck, now that you can compare your outside images on the same screen.  Your images will look sharp and clear, while the images taken by the 3DS are grainy, full of artifacts, and generally look like they were taken using a 1997 model Logitech Quick Cam.  The next thing you’ll notice is how other people are actually willing to look at all those 3D pictures you go around taking, now that they don’t have to wear those stupid glasses all the time.  Every single person I’ve shown it to has remarked how much nicer it is to look at my 3D pictures on the 3DS than any other way.

Of course, now I have to share my 3D pictures with you, in case you don’t have any of your own:

Yosemite:  https://mathpirate.net/hold/3DS/Yosemite3DS.zip 27 pictures of Yosemite National Park, including Glacier Point, the Ahwahnee, Tioga Road, and the Sentinel Dome trail.

Central California: https://mathpirate.net/hold/3DS/CentralCalifornia3DS.zip  56 pictures, including Old Sacramento, Monterey, San Juan Bautista, Pinnacles National Monument, the Big Sur Coast, and Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.

Zion National Park: https://mathpirate.net/hold/3DS/ZionNationalPark3DS.zip 19 pictures of Zion National Park.

Oh yeah.  That’s right.  Built in.

Tweets.  I has them.

Hmmm…  It appears that there are only 13 tweets from Palin, even though it says there should be 15.  I guess the search quit halfway through, just like she did.

Anyway, now I just need to grab a whole bunch of these and index them and see what comes out.

Our next major undertaking must be for a society where productive forces are hampered by political ones.

I just fed it a Ronald Reagan speech.  Some highlights:

Four — Four score and seven years later, Abraham Lincoln called upon to face three grave threats to our economic system.

I ask you to restore to the next, eroding our national will and seek to confound our resolve, but we are today and say, “Well done”?

The present Administration’s been forced by us Republicans to play follow-the-leader with regard to George Bush as the cruel tax of inflation wasted away their purchasing power. And today a great national crusade to make America great again.

We need a rebirth of the Great Depression. 

We do not favor a peacetime draft or registration but — but I do favor pay and benefits slip so low that many of them are demoralized by the confusion and waste they confront in their elected leaders. That kind of relationship, between the President, his Secretary of State, and his U.N. ambassador?

And, the time is now, my fellow citizens of this will be based on any new form of monetary tinkering or fiscal sleight-of-hand. We will remind them that government programs exist at the center of our nation.

But we’re not going to put people back to work, to make America great again.

The Carter Administration lives in a movie on prime time. But this, as you can imagine, is the establishment of lasting world peace. We must halt this fiscal self-destruction and restore sanity to our energy needs.

So true.  So true.

I didn’t even have to try.

I just signed up for an account, said “America!  Woo-hoo!”, and already the Cato Institute is following.  I haven’t even started the application yet.

Of course, this adds an interesting wrinkle to the puzzle.  See, I was proposing a Turing Test wherein the measure of success would be if unsolicited people started following the chatterbot, but I wasn’t expecting that the followers themselves would present me with a Turing Test.

I got this error today.  It is a magnificent demonstration of several layers of FAIL.

The computer can now tell you where to go.

Bombs that will be caught by the buckets in their current position turn green, bombs that will be missed turn red.  If the buckets will catch the lowest bomb, they turn green, otherwise they’re pink and give you a pointer as to how far you need to move and in which direction.  If there are no bombs detected, the buckets turn white.