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YouTube has been innovating its platform rapidly and that’s precisely the reason why it is way, way ahead of contemporary video-hosting websites. Last year, YouTube introduced a feature which would enable video creators to render their video clips as 3D. The good news are that now, the company has made the feature available for common viewers too.

So how is this going to work? Well, first of all, the content needs to be 1080p to be viewed as 3D. Next, all such videos which are 1080p and have been  converted to 3D by the creators, will come with the option of ‘3D’ under the Quality settings pane. The moment a viewer clicks on that option, he will be able to view the video in true 3D, by putting on the special 3D glasses.

YouTube is able to accomplish this feat by taking a video and then analysing the ‘color, spatial layout, and motion to estimate a depth map for each frame of a monoscopic video sequence.’ With the help of this technology, and by learning from actual 3D videos, YouTube is able to create a depth map. And then with the help of the depth map, it converts the video to 3D.

However, there are not a whole lot of 1080p videos on YouTube, which means that for now, you will have rather limited choice in viewing 3D videos. Analysts have also questioned the effectiveness of this feature for 2D videos. Because a video which hasn’t been shot in 3D can be enhanced only so much – eventually, it will feel a lot less 3D than one which is shot as 3D.

Nonetheless, it seems that video creators on the website are beginning to bring in more 3D content. According to the company, the content creators have converted ‘hundreds of thousands’ of videos into 3D over the past few months.

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