If he felt like it, Dr. Joel Stiles could make your head explode.

With just a few tweaks of a computer program, he can produce three-dimensional images that seem to jump off of a projection screen in ways so out of proportion to reality that, well, you might experience the sensation of a ruptured cranium.

	"BWANA DEVIL," released in 1952, was the first 3-D feature film to be seen around the world. The plot centered on man-eating lions attacking builders of the Ugandan Railway.

That, of course, is not the intent of Stiles, a computational neuroscientist at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Rather, he and programmer Stuart Pomerantz developed their stereo animation system because they wanted something that produced high-quality, non-headache-inducing images at a reasonable cost.

"Stereo [image] technology has been around for so long that virtually everyone has seen it, but they have seen it done badly," Stiles said. But he and Pomerantz came up with a process that delivers HDTV-quality stereo viewing by combining their software with off-the-shelf components.

Theirs is a variation on an old technique, similar to what visitors to 3-D theaters at Disney World have seen. Two sets of images, one for the left eye and one for the right, are projected using polarized light with two different orientations. Viewers wearing glasses with polarized lenses can see the left and right channels, resulting in a stereo view.

Stiles, who specializes in building 3-D models of the nervous system and its interfaces with the rest of the body, was hoping that better 3-D visualization would help him and fellow researchers understand complex computer graphics and the real-life molecules, cells and structures they represent.

But now, he and Pomerantz wonder if perhaps their system might have broader applications. Carnegie Mellon University's Innovation Transfer Center is trying to find commercial customers to license the technology, which includes copyrighted software and some patentable elements.

"From our standpoint, stereo technology is horrifically underutilized," Stiles said. Digitally produced movies, such as "Finding Nemo," or most of today's video games, which are based on 3-D representations of data, could be rapidly converted to stereoscopic 3-D with their system, he said. It also might make live action 3-D more attractive.

"Home theater or home entertainment in 2-D has a limited life span," Stiles predicted. He and Pomerantz put their system together for about $12,000. "People spend more than that on home theater systems all the time now for 2-D."

Certainly, there remains interest in 3-D. The movie, "Spy Kids 3-D," for instance, is available on DVD and videotape, using an even older technology that uses glasses with blue and red lenses to separate the left channel from the right. New "glasses-free" technologies are being developed, though they tend to be sensitive to small changes in head position.

But Jesse Schell, an instructor and game developer at CMU's Entertainment Technology Center, says the adoption of stereoscopic 3-D is no sure thing, for reasons that go beyond the technology.

"It's fun as a novelty," Schell said, "but it becomes an obstruction if you're trying to tell a longer story."

Most entertainment requires an audience to suspend belief and, though 3-D sounds as if it might be more realistic than 2-D images, it actually makes it harder for movie viewers to forget that they're watching something that isn't real.

"It's like looking through a keyhole," he said of the viewing experience. When a person's gaze drifts to the side of the screen, he is rapidly reminded that the 3-D images are just images.

And it hasn't been any more successful for video games. "Virtual Boy was one of the biggest flops Nintendo ever had," Schell said.

Stereoscopic imaging has been successfully used in some theme park rides, noted Schell, who previously was creative director of Walt Disney Imagineering's Virtual Reality Studio. Universal's new Spiderman ride, for instance, effectively uses several large 3-D screens, he said.

Robert Conway, project manager for the Innovation Transfer Center, said everyone who has seen a demonstration of the technology "is universally impressed."

But he hasn't yet found a buyer. "They say, 'This is really cool, really great, but it doesn't fit our particular company.' "

Engineering design systems and medical simulation training may be more likely early applications than home entertainment, Conway said, noting a lack of 3-D entertainment products. "If you invent a telephone," he explained, "it's no good until somebody else gets a telephone."

Though Schell hasn't seen the Stereo Animation System, he said it might be useful for an application such as the Spiderman ride, which uses several 3-D films that play in a continuous loop. The supercomputing center's system is able to play directly from digital data files, which would not be subject to the deterioration that plagues film.

One of the reasons the new system is able to deliver such high quality images is that it can process data at rates about 20 times faster than a typical DVD movie. Pomerantz developed software that allows a computer to rapidly decode video data.

Most computers rely on a piece of hardware, a videocard, to decode this data. That was necessary years ago because the central processing units and memory cards of personal computers couldn't handle the necessary data rates.

"Now, CPUs are so much faster and memory is so much cheaper that you can bypass the videocard, if you know how," Stiles said.

To simultaneously decode the left and right channels, a two-processor computer is needed. But two-processor computers are no longer exotic; Stiles and Pomerantz ordered theirs from Dell Computer.

"The idea was to build something as cheaply as possible with off-the-shelf components," Pomerantz said.

The system also includes software that enables the parallax ---- the separation between the left and right channels ---- to be adjusted smoothly so that the 3-D effects are realistic, rather than widely exaggerated, and the exploding head sensation thus can be avoided among viewers.

The system uses two PC projectors with polarized lenses and images are projected on a non-depolarizing screen. The system is portable and Stiles said he has had good response when he has used it to present his own research at scientific conferences.

He also has received an endorsement from an admittedly biased source. While watching "Spy Kids 3-D" at home one day, one of Stiles' sons ripped off his stereo vision glasses in frustration.

"Dad," he said, "why can't they make this the way you make movies?"