

In general, pick the sign that yields the smaller, but positive, $R$. The printer does this over and over, building up.

The print head moves around very precisely in three dimensions and drops lines of plastic onto the print bedthe table on which it prints. Strands of plastic are fed into a print head, which is heated up to melt the material. If we are outside the sphere, use $-$ above if we are inside the sphere, use $+$ above. Picture a robot-controlled hot glue gun that uses plastic instead of glue, and you have the basics of a 3D printer. Click on Window in the main menu, select 3D, and a dialog box will open. Create a new file with the text you’d like to turn into a 3D image.
#DOES 2D TO 3D CONVERSION REALLY WORK HOW TO#
Therefore, the 2D coordinates of that detail on the window are Here, we’ll get you started by showing you how to turn 2D text into 3D. Let's say one of the 3D coordinates of an interesting detail, say a corner of the greenish cube above, are $(x, y, z)$. In a very real sense, those coordinates are obtained by linear interpolation, except that one end of the line segment is at the eye (which we already decided is the origin, so coordinates $(0, 0, 0)$, the other end is at the 3D coordinates of the detail we wish to project, and the interpolation point is where that sight line (usually called "ray") intersects the view plane (the window, in our case).

The blue pane is the window, the eye is at the lower left corner, and we are interested in the projected coordinates (projected to the window, that is) of the four corners of some cube at some distance. Here is a rough diagram of the situation: These coordinates are what OP needs to draw 3D pictures to a 2D surface. If we know the 3D coordinates in the above coordinate system of interesting details outside, 3D projection tells us their coordinates on the surface of the window. Thus, the center of the window is at $(0, 0, d)$, where $d$ is the distance from the eye to the window. Using OP's conventions, $x$ axis increases up, $y$ axis right, and $z$ axis outside the window. If you stand in the center of the window, looking out through the center of the window, then we can treat the center of your eye (more precisely, the center of the lens in the pupil of your dominant eye) the origin in 3D coordinates. Google has been doing it with the Pixel phones for years, and the LucidPix app we wrote about last month does much. Let's assume you stand in front of a window, looking out. Facebook is obviously not the first to use AI to infer 3D data from a 2D image. It is all based on optics, and (linear) algebra. The hard part is understanding how it is done and that is what I shall try to explain here.
