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.
Since the advent of models like Depth Anything, you can now convert 2D images into this effect using them plus a bit of creative processing. Here's a non-technical overview that plugs some software and talks about the underlying models: https://www.owl3d.com/blog/2d-to-stereoscopic-3d-with-ai-dep...
This is very common in structural biology papers, where you need to make figure of complex 3D arrangements of atoms, but the figures must be printed in 2D. Typically using molecular modeling software, you find your view of choice. Then you rotate +- 0.5° and render two images, and put those side by side as a stereo pair figure.
It takes quite a bit of practice to see them well:
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...
A great source for stereo pairs is NOAA's aerial imagery data, consisting of various snapshots along an airplane's trajectory. For example here is a stereo pair of Desecheo Island:
Those who fail to cross eye/parallel eye these images can try looking at these through a (DIY) binocular (empty pipes/used kitchen roll should work the same).
It will only work with parallel eye images though (at the end of this article).
I can generally see the Magic Eye pictures very well.. these are way harder.
The tiny thumbnails at the bottom of the page work, but the larger images I can't cross my eyes enough.
I think it depends greatly on getting the screen/image size just the right size and also getting the viewing distance right. On large monitors it seems harder to see.
> 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’ve been able to view these type of pictures forever. But I’ll credit the article with today being the first time I’ve actually taken them myself, put them side by side in my notes app, and been pretty impressed with how simple it was to get a neat effect.
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.
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.
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.
I love this effect. I had a book of Magic Eye pictures as a kid, which was a similar effect.
I'm not sure how practical the "crossing your eyes to get 3D" thing actually is, it makes my eyes water after a minute or so, but it's still sort of cool to see my cheapy monitor doing 3D without any special glasses.
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.
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.
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.
most stereograms are designed to look correct when you cross your eyes
This is how I look at stereograms (looking nearer than the page), but at least some of the images on this page seem like they're designed for the other way around (looking in the distance, beyond the page).
This one looks weird when I look at it cross eyed, but fine when I look at the other way.
I've done this with my SLR. Moving the camera different amounts can give a more pronounced effect, however it can be more difficult to get the image to converge.
I had a lot of fun with doing this 20 years ago. Sadly, my visual acuity has become significantly different between my eyes (even w/ correction) and the enjoyment of 3D displays has really diminished as as result.
Just musing because I'm working and busy:
I wonder how difficult it would be to do video. (Obviously you'd have to shoot two videos in parallel versus just moving the camera and shooting again.)
Converting existing 3D videos to a cross-eyed viewing format would probably be the easiest way to experiment with it. I wonder if anybody has done that. I've never looked at 3D movie formats before. I always assumed it was two interleaved streams.
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 remember reading about a physical device someone constructed with mirrors (I think at an early burning man) that gave you the experience of a huge inter ocular distance to get a giant's eye view. I've always wanted to try one (or the opposite to experience a tiny inter ocular distance).
A pair of periscopes laid flat will do it, but it'll really confuse your eyes. I can feel it on these images: the eye muscles are trying to converge on a distance closer than the focusing muscles want to focus on, and I can tell that's a bit weird. That might be an age thing though.
The reason you need to change the inter-frame distance is because the amount of information carried by the parallax drops off quite quickly, to the extent that at the sort of distance in the tree photo, your brain is mostly using motion cues for 3d reconstruction, not stereo vision. Increasing the horizontal distance simulates bringing everything correspondingly closer.
The video game Magic Carpet had a couple of 3D modes, anaglyph 3d requiring blue/red classes, and stereogram mode [1]. The latter was not really usable, but it was a cool trick, expecially for the time ('94).
They're not far enough apart. Stereo vision on humans is best inside 3-5 metres, usually, and by 10 metres out is not that great.
That's with pupils 65mm apart, give or take. Now scale that down to the horizontal distance between lenses on a phone. Coincidentally on mine they are about 13mm apart. You just multiply everything down linearly: my camera has the same experience at 60mm distance from an object as I do at 3m. It would be pretty useless past 2m, but also with those constraints you'd notice the quality drop off with range within a single object that was approaching 50cm depth.
Now that's OK itself, you could get some useful work done with that, but there are so many provisos to it that it would be very hard to sell as a feature. To top that off it's algorithmically painful. There's a reason the commercial 3D scanners don't (typically, only) use stereo pairs; there's almost always a better way to do it.
(oh, and to get out ahead of questions: Spatial Video capture on the iphone 15 apparently uses the LIDAR sensor for the depth map, not just the cameras)
Yes, the spatial videos that iPhones can record are just stereoscopic video. This hasn't been cloned by other manufacturers because there have been very few viewing devices that they own, but that might change with Android XR.
The first set are (as the text says) designed for cross-eyed viewing, the others for parallel. These use opposite left/right arrangement. So if it feels like half of them are backwards, you are maybe using the same viewing method for both sets?
I just went back and doubled checked, and they're all correct. If they look inverted, you are probably diverging your eyes ("parallel view") instead of crossing them. If that's more comfortable for you there is a section of images arranged with that orientation at the end of the article.
Came to say the same. Depth is inverted for me. Is it because instead of looking at each picture with the eyes straight, we cross them (and each sees the opposite picture)?
Heh I thought you must've tested these on a teeny tiny monitor to make them work. No wonder! But of course when crossing eyes there is essentially no limit. Thanks for the clarification.
I prefer wigglegrams. If you're looking for an example - Wikipedia page has one from 1927[1]!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiggle_stereoscopy
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.
I’m surprised that phone manufacturers don’t stick cameras on opposite ends of the phone to allow the quick capture of these.
Since the advent of models like Depth Anything, you can now convert 2D images into this effect using them plus a bit of creative processing. Here's a non-technical overview that plugs some software and talks about the underlying models: https://www.owl3d.com/blog/2d-to-stereoscopic-3d-with-ai-dep...
Bonus, I also found this real-time 3D-ifier for your screen: https://github.com/zjkhurry/stereopsis-anything
This is very common in structural biology papers, where you need to make figure of complex 3D arrangements of atoms, but the figures must be printed in 2D. Typically using molecular modeling software, you find your view of choice. Then you rotate +- 0.5° and render two images, and put those side by side as a stereo pair figure.
It takes quite a bit of practice to see them well:
https://spdbv.unil.ch/TheMolecularLevel/0Help/StereoView.htm...
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...
When they wrote "your screen can display 3D photos", I thought it would be a hardware hack and not something that depends on a human physiology hack.
Something like stereoscopic GIFs come to mind, e.g. https://tenor.com/fr-CA/view/dain-stereoscopic-daingifs-3d-m...
In other words, taking the two images and swapping them quickly creates the illusion of depth.
Edit:
Looking into it, there's a word for it. Wiggle stereoscopy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiggle_stereoscopy
There's a whole bunch of these over at https://old.reddit.com/r/wigglegrams/ if you want more
A great source for stereo pairs is NOAA's aerial imagery data, consisting of various snapshots along an airplane's trajectory. For example here is a stereo pair of Desecheo Island:
https://cdn.coastalscience.noaa.gov/datasets/aerialphotodb/u...
https://cdn.coastalscience.noaa.gov/datasets/aerialphotodb/u...
EDIT it can be tedious to discover such pairs. If only there were a tool...
Those who fail to cross eye/parallel eye these images can try looking at these through a (DIY) binocular (empty pipes/used kitchen roll should work the same).
It will only work with parallel eye images though (at the end of this article).
I can generally see the Magic Eye pictures very well.. these are way harder.
The tiny thumbnails at the bottom of the page work, but the larger images I can't cross my eyes enough.
I think it depends greatly on getting the screen/image size just the right size and also getting the viewing distance right. On large monitors it seems harder to see.
> 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
Magic eye pictures are viewed by diverging your eyes, so the "parallel view" versions at the bottom work correctly with that method.
"Cross view" pictures require converging your eyes, so the images have to be in the opposite position from what your eye would see.
Yes, making them smaller certainly helps.
[flagged]
I’ve been able to view these type of pictures forever. But I’ll credit the article with today being the first time I’ve actually taken them myself, put them side by side in my notes app, and been pretty impressed with how simple it was to get a neat effect.
Great! I wrote this in the hopes that more people would start making them, because I love them.
Ugh, there's some people out there who cannot see these. Not for a lack of trying, I've personally been trying since the 90s.
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.
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)
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.
I don't get it... the reddit image is the same on both sides. Trying to look at it cross-eyed just gives me a headache.
"Foreground text describes viewing type" - there is no foreground, it's just text on a page?
I don't think I understand what the image is supposed to do. I can only see from one eye at a time.
Amblyopia and monocular diplopia here. No way I can see these, my brain won't let me.
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.
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.
I am with you. I could also never see the hidden image things. Been trying for 40 years.
Do you manage to align the two small white squares above each picture so they are on top of each other?
I love this effect. I had a book of Magic Eye pictures as a kid, which was a similar effect.
I'm not sure how practical the "crossing your eyes to get 3D" thing actually is, it makes my eyes water after a minute or so, but it's still sort of cool to see my cheapy monitor doing 3D without any special glasses.
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.
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.
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.
"Wow, a sailboat!"
This one looks weird when I look at it cross eyed, but fine when I look at the other way.
https://moultano.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/17...
Yes, the ones at the bottom, in the "Parallel View" section are designed to be viewed the other way.
Sorry, I stopped reading part way and was just viewing the cool images! That will teach me!
I was confused that some were fine and others (the later ones) looked weird!
Nintendo 3DS gang rise up! Though it wasn't perfect or useful that much it was still a nice feature, made some fun photos with it.
I've done this with my SLR. Moving the camera different amounts can give a more pronounced effect, however it can be more difficult to get the image to converge.
I had a lot of fun with doing this 20 years ago. Sadly, my visual acuity has become significantly different between my eyes (even w/ correction) and the enjoyment of 3D displays has really diminished as as result.
Just musing because I'm working and busy:
I wonder how difficult it would be to do video. (Obviously you'd have to shoot two videos in parallel versus just moving the camera and shooting again.)
Converting existing 3D videos to a cross-eyed viewing format would probably be the easiest way to experiment with it. I wonder if anybody has done that. I've never looked at 3D movie formats before. I always assumed it was two interleaved streams.
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.
For that matter, there are a couple of "Magic Eye" videos out there, which look like TV static until you cross your eyes enough.
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.
The point is that you can force the respective of a giant or an ant if you so choose.
Using two cameras I had a time lapse of a fog coming in where you could see the 3d structure becuase they were at two different streets looking out.
Like op this was done nearly 20 years ago. Now you don't even get fog any more.
I remember reading about a physical device someone constructed with mirrors (I think at an early burning man) that gave you the experience of a huge inter ocular distance to get a giant's eye view. I've always wanted to try one (or the opposite to experience a tiny inter ocular distance).
A pair of periscopes laid flat will do it, but it'll really confuse your eyes. I can feel it on these images: the eye muscles are trying to converge on a distance closer than the focusing muscles want to focus on, and I can tell that's a bit weird. That might be an age thing though.
Found it http://eyestilts.com/intro.html
The reason you need to change the inter-frame distance is because the amount of information carried by the parallax drops off quite quickly, to the extent that at the sort of distance in the tree photo, your brain is mostly using motion cues for 3d reconstruction, not stereo vision. Increasing the horizontal distance simulates bringing everything correspondingly closer.
The video game Magic Carpet had a couple of 3D modes, anaglyph 3d requiring blue/red classes, and stereogram mode [1]. The latter was not really usable, but it was a cool trick, expecially for the time ('94).
[1] https://youtu.be/iZT-S2F191I?si=8k9jniqA98wgq0Hu&t=1090
> Your screen can display 3D photos.
That's a stretch, but I guess clickbait is required to get engagement nowadays.
> nowadays
People have been writing provocative titles for things since before the internet.
As long as you don't regret the click, I don't regret baiting the click. :)
I want to know why cannot the multiple cameras on my phone be used to create 3D images.
They're not far enough apart. Stereo vision on humans is best inside 3-5 metres, usually, and by 10 metres out is not that great.
That's with pupils 65mm apart, give or take. Now scale that down to the horizontal distance between lenses on a phone. Coincidentally on mine they are about 13mm apart. You just multiply everything down linearly: my camera has the same experience at 60mm distance from an object as I do at 3m. It would be pretty useless past 2m, but also with those constraints you'd notice the quality drop off with range within a single object that was approaching 50cm depth.
Now that's OK itself, you could get some useful work done with that, but there are so many provisos to it that it would be very hard to sell as a feature. To top that off it's algorithmically painful. There's a reason the commercial 3D scanners don't (typically, only) use stereo pairs; there's almost always a better way to do it.
(oh, and to get out ahead of questions: Spatial Video capture on the iphone 15 apparently uses the LIDAR sensor for the depth map, not just the cameras)
They can, or? Apple calls that spatial videos, or does that work differently?
Yes, the spatial videos that iPhones can record are just stereoscopic video. This hasn't been cloned by other manufacturers because there have been very few viewing devices that they own, but that might change with Android XR.
Because they are not the same focal length? Although I'm sure software can mitigate that to some extent.
Jokes on you! I can only see from one eye at a time!
Yep, same here. Discovered I was stereoblind quite late as well as I thought it was the norm and my brain just got used to it.
I thought this would be about wigglegrams
Is it just me or do they have some of the left/right images swapped?
The first set are (as the text says) designed for cross-eyed viewing, the others for parallel. These use opposite left/right arrangement. So if it feels like half of them are backwards, you are maybe using the same viewing method for both sets?
I just went back and doubled checked, and they're all correct. If they look inverted, you are probably diverging your eyes ("parallel view") instead of crossing them. If that's more comfortable for you there is a section of images arranged with that orientation at the end of the article.
Came to say the same. Depth is inverted for me. Is it because instead of looking at each picture with the eyes straight, we cross them (and each sees the opposite picture)?
If they look inverted you are probably diverging your eyes instead of crossing them. In that case the images in this section should look correct. https://moultano.wordpress.com/2025/02/24/you-should-make-cr...
Heh I thought you must've tested these on a teeny tiny monitor to make them work. No wonder! But of course when crossing eyes there is essentially no limit. Thanks for the clarification.
[dead]