A few days ago Search Engine Roundtable discovered that YouTube, the insanely popular video site (you know), is playing with a stereo 3D feature.

Already, you can go to YouTube and watch stereoscopic content, or upload your own.

Currently YouTube can display the video, which originally has to be side-by-side format, in anaglyph formats (colored glasses), cross-eyed and focus-thru viewing and only left or right image. Since they are only in early beta, I really hope we will see some fullscreen viewing for 3D enabled monitors. My impression is that the cross-eyed viewing is the best for allowing anyone without any form of 3D glasses to be able to look into the fantastic stereoscopic 3D world.

It's the Google employee Peter Bradshaw (Yes, YouTube is owned by Google), which calls himself YouTube Pete, which is developing the stereoscopic 3D player as a 20% part time project.

Quoting Pete, the proposed tags for enabling 3D content in the videoplayer are:

"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. Apologies for the inconvineince.
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."

At the time 3D videos seems to automatically be shown in Red-Blue format, but I hope they will show the selection box again when they are out of beta.

You can read more, follow and participate in the development in the google support forum

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