All Of YouTube's 1080p Videos Are Going 3D

Even here on Slashfilm, the ease of shooting video has made things more visual. Interviews are regularly being shot with our iPhones instead of simply recording and transcribing because the visual element, hopefully, makes you feel like you're part of the conversation. YouTube sees this immersion going even further, though, as they've begun to roll out an option that'll turn any video uploaded in 1080p into 3D. One click, pop on some glasses, and you can see any 1080p YouTube video in 3D. How does this work and what does it look like? Read more after the jump.

YouTube dropped the news on their blog, which was then farmed out to all the tech sites such as Gizmodo. YouTube says the option is available now by simply clicking the "Quality" settlings on a video. However, it seems, at this moment at least, the uploader must first enable that option by going to "Edit Info." Whether it'll become automatic or automatically become enabled on all older videos is still unclear, but that seems to be the idea. Here's the example YouTube posted. Notice the new addition on the bottom.

I've enabled the following video interview I did with Damon Lindelof about Prometheus for 3D but the site says "3D video conversion in progress and may take a while. Please check back later." So I'm just posting it here and hopefully it'll change soon. [UPDATE - The process is now complete.]

The YouTube blog has a detailed description of how this technology works which you can read there but I like Gizmodo's shorter one better:

The process relies on a self-teaching algorithm to accurately split the image into two and set the proper depth, then farms out the actual conversion to the Google Cloud architecture which breaks the video into chunks and process each piece in parallel. 3D picture quality can be either 360 or 720.

Is this something you see yourself using in the future? How do you think it works?