TITLE
CONTENTS
ABSTRACT
EPIGRAPH
INTRODUCTION
ILLUSTRATIONS
DISCUSSION
APPENDIX
REFERENCES
Write us.
METHODData Collection
As noted earlier, our illustrative research question concerned the consumption experience associated with living in New York City or, more colloquially, the goal of collectively expressing "What New York Means To Me." Toward that end, forty-six graduate students (half men and half women with ages ranging from their late twenties to early thirties) in two marketing classes at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business participated as informants by following the set of instructions provided in the carefully worded questionnaire that appears in the Appendix.
Briefly, each informant was asked to address the theme of "What New York Means To Me" by taking a couple of representative stereo photographs and by composing a brief vignette to indicate the significance of these photos. Emphasis was placed on finding "some scene that captures the essence of what New York means to you"; on representing that scene pictorially "from two somewhat different angles and/or set up in two somewhat different ways"; and on providing a verbal paragraph intended to "describe the relevant scene ... and convey why you have selected this particular scene."
Much of the questionnaire covered the housekeeping chores of circulating the cameras from student to student (not a trivial concern, as it turned out), providing the necessary permissions (via the appropriate signatures), and properly executing the stereo photographs themselves (by means of composing the pictures in an interesting way, insuring adequate lighting, holding the cameras correctly, and releasing their shutters simultaneously).
Stereo Pairs
As indicated by the aforementioned review papers (Holbrook 1996a, 1996c), innumerable techniques exist for generating three-dimensional stereographic images. The approach used here relied on the cheapness and ease of taking pictures with disposable cameras such as those produced by Fuji and Kodak. For this purpose, matched camera pairs (half from each manufacturer) were taped together end-to-end with instructions to fire them simultaneously, preferably in good sunlight and always using the built-in flashes, at a distance of about ten feet from the nearest part of the target subject. Ideally, such procedures would insure a good to adequate stereographic photo on almost every shot. Past experience suggests, however, that untrained informants succeed only about half the time. For this reason, each informant was asked to take at least two photographs of his or her scene of interest, as viewed from at least two different angles.
After developing, stereo pairs must be carefully cropped and mounted side-by-side to recreate the left-versus-right positioning of the twinned cameras. (For pointers on cropping and mounting, see Burder and Whitehouse 1992; Ferwerda 1990; Waack 1987; White 1996.) Here, the cropping must insure that corresponding components in the two images occur at the same height vertically so as to avoid very uncomfortable eyestrain. Further, to preserve the "stereo window" in which objects appear behind the plane of the page or screen, the cropping should be done in such a way that objects closest to the reader or viewer lie at the same horizontal position from left-to-right with respect to the edges of their two respective borders. For reasons of binocular parallax, the objects behind those closest to the reader or viewer will of course appear at different horizontal positions in the two images. (To verify this basic principle of stereoscopic vision, look out a real window and close first one eye, then the other. This "stereo window" will appear to stay in one place while the scene behind it seems to shift from side to side. This is the effect that cropping must recreate in order to achieve realistic stereography.)
Free-Viewing and Aided Viewing
Free-Viewing. When confined to a combined double-image width of no more than about five inches -- that is, a single-image width that matches the 2.5-inch interocular distance of the typical reader or viewer -- stereo pairs of the type just described may be free-viewed without the aid of any sort of mechanical assistance or optical device. To do this, place the stereo pair close to the eyes, look through the two pictures, and then move the face slowly away from the pair while continuing to gaze straight ahead until the two pictures come into focus and fuse into one stereo 3-D image. Tutorials on this sort of free-viewing appear in a wide variety of publications (Alderson 1988; Best 1979; Brown 1903/1994; Ferwerda 1990; Girling 1990; Grossman and Cooper 1995; Johnstone 1995; Norton 1994; Pratt 1995; Richardson 1994; Waack 1987; Waldsmith 1991). The fact that many or even most people are functionally capable of achieving stereopsis in this manner is attested to by the immense world-wide popularity of the best-selling "autostereogram," "stareogram," or "magic eye" books that rely on essentially the same free-viewing technique (Cadence 1994a, 1994b; Dyckman 1994; Grossman and Cooper 1995; N. E. Thing Enterprises 1993, 1994a, 1994b; Riemschneider 1994; Saburi 1993; 21st Century 1994). However, the achievement of stereopsis via free-viewing does require a certain amount of practice because it involves overcoming an inveterate response in which our eyes habitually tend to point inward (converge) and to focus (accommodate) at the same time as some object comes closer to us. Free-viewing requires the decoupling of convergence and accommodation so that we manage to relax the eyes in a way that allows them to look straight ahead at the two images (without converging) while simultaneously focusing on the pictures in close proximity to the face (accommodating). Some people are able to learn this technique very quickly. For others, its mastery requires hours, days, or even weeks. Those readers who do not wish to invest this level of time and effort in learning to achieve stereopsis in the free-viewing of stereo pairs may therefore wish to rely on one of the effective approaches to aided viewing.
Aided Viewing. Aided Viewing. Though numerous approaches to aided viewing exist, two are particularly well-suited to the sorts of pictorial stimuli likely to appear in marketing and consumer research. The first facilitates the stereoptical fusion of the stereo pairs just described by means of a prismatic lorgnette viewer that bends the light rays from the right and left pictures in such a way as to bring them into alignment for the two eyes when converging and focusing their normal manner. The second converts the left and right images to blue-or-green and red shades of color respectively and then superimposes these two pictures onto the same visual space to form "anaglyphs" for purposes of viewing through red-and-blue/green glasses (which filter out the material of opposing colors to retain the appropriate image for each eye). In the United States, such aids to viewing -- the prismatic lorgnette or the red-and-blue/green glasses, as needed -- may be ordered at costs of about four dollars or fifty cents, respectively, from either Cygnus Graphic (P.O. Box 32461, Phoenix, AZ 85064, 602-277-9253) or Reel 3-D Enterprises (P.O. Box 2368, Culver City, CA 90231, 310-837-2368). Both direct-marketing operations offer quick service -- the former by personal check through the mails and the latter via credit card over the phone. In the United Kingdom and Europe, comparable lorgnette and red-blue/green viewers may be obtained from the Stereoscopic Society (c/o Eric Silk, 221 Arbury Road, Cambridge, CB4 2JJ, England) and Bode Verlag GmbH (Postfach 405, D-45716 Haltern, Germany). (Alternatively, the authors will lend a suitable viewer to any reader who is unable or unwilling to make the modest financial commitment just described, who sends a self-addressed envelope with a request to borrow the prismatic lorgnette or red-blue glasses for the duration needed, and who promises to return the viewer when finished.)
Analysis and Presentation
The introspective vignettes and stereographic photos collected from our informants were interpreted by the authors for key themes reflecting the consumption experiences associated with the general topic "What New York Means To Me." In our view, the relevant aspects of the "New York Experience" could be summarized under seven major thematic headings: (1) Pleasures; (2) Opportunities; (3) Loved Ones; (4) Stress; (5) Distress; (6) Respite; and (7) Ambivalence. Though many self-reports mentioned more than one of these key motifs in passing, most emphasized one of the seven themes over the others and attempted to convey its meaning stereographically.
In what follows, we shall present quotations from the introspective vignettes together with stereographic photos taken by our informants to represent the significance of those self-reflections. We intend these as illustrations of our proposed approach to creating a collective stereographic photo essay in general and of the themes that emerged concerning our guiding question of "What New York Means To Me" in particular.
These verbal and pictorial illustrations may be read or viewed in one or both of two formats. First, we present our collective stereographic photo essay in the form of a conventional paper featuring stereo pairs of 3-D photos suitable for reproduction on the printed page and typical of the articles that appear in our journals or books on marketing and consumer research. In this paper, the seven major themes just mentioned are captured by seven montages numbered from 1 to 7 -- each with four stereo pairs referred to as UL, LL, UR, and LR to designate the upper left, lower left, upper right, and lower right corners, respectively. For example, UR3 indicates the photo pair in the upper right-hand corner of the third montage. Second, we present our 3-D photos both as stereo pairs and as red-blue anaglyphs that can be visited on the World Wide Web at http://www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~kuwahara/ by clicking onto the insignia that says "What New York Means to Me." In this electronic presentation, the stereographs are interwoven with the various portions of the text that they depict. We invite our readers to pursue both approaches to showing and viewing our verbal and pictorial illustrations. Indeed, with suitable color corrections, the electronic anaglyphs can be reproduced on transparencies and displayed by overhead projectors on movie screens for purposes of presenting them to the members of an audience equipped with the appropriate red-blue glasses.
|