Cross Views

Was going to say the same thing. Presenting stereo pairs has a lot of layout and resolution issues to say nothing of the fact that some people have stereo blindness to varying degrees (lazy eye is an extreme case). The author is correct that stereo depth can greatly enhance an image, but a wigglegram does this at full resolution with no visual puzzle solving.

Thank you! I have not, to this day, have been able to see any Magic Eye/Cross Eyed or similar images. A wigglegram is immediately trivial.

I'd probably most appreciate a layout with one frame on the left, the wigglegram in the middle, and the other frame on the right, so that I can get a sense of both the distances and the detail.

WHAT... this is the first time in my life I have been able to see 3D with one eye!

Closing one eye and I still see the depth effect.

Main brain works very differently than I assumed...

With this effect I guess one could make even people who are blind on one eye see in 3D

I'm slightly suspicious that this comment was written by a bird.

Thanks for that! It is quite impressive and I learned to see the 3D molecule on first try.

I remember seeing something similar, but made of an array of dots (you did not know what was behind the doors until you see it by crossing your eyes)

I did this on a school project back in the 90's, with a structure of quinol clathrate that was completely wrong but very pretty. I was very into povray at the time. My chemistry teacher didn't quite know what to make of it...

technically rotation is going to end up giving a slightly different result than lateral displacement, right? but it's very similar for small distances.

This is great! I can only imagine how strange it would look to observe someone reading an article this way, but it's a great idea!

Now just need to duplicate the mouse cursor to be in 3D too!

I also had to shrink the window as I couldn't manage the cross view on a widescreen :)

Clever!

Very relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42655870

It's interesting how the difference appears, a strange artifact. Very fun to feel like a pro clicking through the differences quickly

My mind is blown right now. This is so cool.

There's a whole bunch of these over at https://old.reddit.com/r/wigglegrams/ if you want more

> You can do this by holding your finger substantially in front of the image, and focusing solely on the finger with your eyes, while turning your mind’s attention to the image behind it while keeping your eyes still.

This tip in the article helped me a lot, it's much easier to cross your eyes further with something to actually focus on

It's helpful if you can smoothly zoom in on the images. Start zoomed out far enough that you can easily see the effect, and then slowly enlarge the images. Your brain will work to keep them in focus.

I believe the author switched left and right. Because the inverse ones at the bottom work fine

The best way I came across doing this is to try and do a "thousand yard stare" while looking at the image. It's super reliable.

Zoom out on the page a few times. Try 50%

Yes, making them smaller certainly helps.

I had the same book - the one with the black border? :) There was a dolphin or something, right? So long ago, can barely remember...

The water eye thing only happens to me if I cross my eyes and focus before the picture and not behind the picture. The latter takes some time to let the eyes relax, but its much more natural.

If you stitch the photos together seamlessly, you can display them on a VR headset in a really natural way. I take stereo images in landscape mode, stitch them together top/bottom, and then enjoy them on my Quest 2 using the Pigasus media player.

If you use a 180° fisheye lens, you can immerse yourself in the scene. just make sure to keep the camera perfectly level, or you'll end up making yourself sick if you try to view the images unadjusted.

I only learned somewhat recently that a lot of (or all?) Magic Eyes are meant to be parallel viewed instead of cross eyed. The difference was pretty impressive the first time I saw one correctly.

I seem to recall that Magic Eye pictures had you decross your eyes, so you were looking past the page. It was a bit harder to do.

"Wow, a sailboat!"

eh, you get used to it. I've watched whole movies like this

I remember seeing video done this way on youtube during the 3D tv craze about 10 years ago (not the 3d stuff that youtube supported, this was just people messing about with 2 images side by side). It worked about as well as the examples here, but was not a particularly comfortable experience for anything longer than a few minutes.

> I wonder how difficult it would be to do video

One approach is time-shifted side-window video. Time-offset frame pairs from mono video that's pointed perpendicular to camera motion. Pretending that frames offset in space, time, and orientation, are offset only in horizontal-space-perpendicular-to-shot. Sufficiently perpendicular that difference in apparent size within pairs doesn't bite, and similarly for motion stability, orientation, distance from subjects, and non-horizontal motion. Phone video out the side window of a train/plane/bus/car with a view, or a drone footage segment that meets constraints. River seen from bridge-crossing train window; waiting rocket seen from circling drone. Upside is easy capture, and an inter-ocular distance that's potentially quite large (miles) and adjustable in post processing. Downsides include non-static things don't fuse (traffic by that river, fog off the rocket), and it can be a pain to find usable segments in existing video.

With AI generating depth maps from mono images, and filling in image gaps, it may someday be possible to generate stereo from some mono video. One challenge is visual artifacts involving depth can be very noticeable.

You should move it by the distance of your pupils for the best effect. Mine is bog standard 63mm so I'm lucky.

If you get it wrong things will look too big or too small and the 3D effect will be softer or too pronounced.

3d cameras though won't let you experiment with the distance between images. It'll give you a consistent look, similar to what our eyes see, but what's cool about using one camera and moving it is you can exaggerate the distance to show depth much farther away.

I have always had trouble with magic-eye pictures - I am told my eyes are quite different shapes. I can see stereograms with some effort.

I believe that there is a small percentage of the population for whom stereoscopic images (including 3d films) just don't work at all. Either they lack the ability to perceive depth directly or their brains aren't fooled by images with no parallax relative to their eye movements. I don't have any cites for this though.

There are two communities, you need to find out which one you belong to.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CrossView

https://www.reddit.com/r/ParallelView

There is a test image you can try:

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fg...

Whichever "view" looks to be closer is the one you should use.

Have you tried using pipes/kitchen towel rolls?

As in, try doing something like this:

1. Zoom the images small enough to be almost parallel to your eyes.

2. Make a binocular out of used kitchen rolls.

3. Each side should look at exactly one of the images

It should just work. Both images should converge like they do in a binocular.

(you can then try removing this DIY binocular suddenly and see if you can maintain focus)

It took me a while too. Especially those double images that look totally contorted and only come out when you relax your focus. It took ages but suddenly they popped and now i can do them every time. Once they came through they were crystal clear.

I am with you. I could also never see the hidden image things. Been trying for 40 years.

I made a stereogram a few years back that turned out to be unusually easy for people to view. Perhaps you'll have luck with it:

https://www.damninteresting.com/temp/damn-interesting-stereo...

The trick is to focus normally on the image, then move your focus to be a few inches behind your screen, as if you're looking through it at something behind.

The trick for me was to completely cross my eyes and produce the double images, then slowly uncross/cross them until I could start to see the image, which eventually clears up.

Do you manage to align the two small white squares above each picture so they are on top of each other?