Tips on using displacement filter to make 2D->3D video conversion

I experimented with this a little while back but was wondering if anyone has tried this with Blender, and, if so, what suggestions you might have to do this well.

I’d like to convert a 2D video to stereoscopic 3D. It seems that, through the displacement filter, it might be relatively simple to feed in a grayscale version of the video to the filter (the brighter sections of the video would be closer to the viewer and vice versa) so that a mesh – which has the original video as a texture – sticks out or sinks back into the screen.

Has anybody successfully attempted a project like this? I didn’t see any examples in the forum or elsewhere online.

There is no depth data in the brightness of the image. This will accomplish absolutely nothing. It would be the same as to expect to restore color of a black and white photo with an Instagram filter. Conversion from 2d to 3d is a long and tiresome process, there is no quick and easy magic workaround.

I guess I wasn’t clear in my original post. Assume that grayscale video fed into the displacement filter is already set up to be an animated depth map. I’m not totally sure how I’d create the animated depth map video, but I have a few ideas.

I realize 2D -> 3D conversion is generally a tedious process (I’ve messed around with it a bit) but I’m curious to see if I can accomplish some half decent results using Blender. Before I experiment with this, though, I want to see if anyone else has done it first.