July 29, 2002

9:00 AM

Not as immediately satisfying as its more recent cousin (tho ugh far better for those of us who value integrity of image color over eyestrain,) let’s look for a minute at some stereoscopy. Stereoscopy has been to the Moon. It’s been used to capture images of famous people and mundane subjects alike, such as some guy’s cat (w a tc h out, John Ashcroft!), what appears to be Jandek’s house, and various city scenes. It’s been used on Mars. It’s not just a source of beautiful antiques, either. Apparently, it’s still around. Want to learn how to do all this yourself? Here’s how. And if you can’t take the strain, you can always buy a book like this and pu t yo ur ow n pictu res in side. More history here and here.?
posted by interrobang (11 comments total)

all that stuff did not appear in preview. curse you, metafilter!ô
posted by interrobang at 9:05 AM on July 29, 2002

thanks, phantom editor.
posted by interrobang at 9:10 AM on July 29, 2002

Here is the first broken link, the introduction to stereoscopy.

This is the aol one on steroscopic viewers.

Here's the next one. It's about flat card viewers.

Interrobang: you need to make sure you don't have any spaces in the URLs you enter after the "href". Web browsers insert "%20" when they see it, and thus you get a broken link.

Cheers.
posted by rocketman at 9:27 AM on July 29, 2002

aargh.
posted by interrobang at 9:29 AM on July 29, 2002

*system overload* too many links in one post *system overload*
posted by kingmissile at 9:37 AM on July 29, 2002

kingmissile -

They were good links, and this post seems to be better than many at adhering to the original vision of metafilter.
posted by Irontom at 10:09 AM on July 29, 2002

A long while back, I experimented with creating raytraced stereoscopic images with POV-Ray, a free raytracer. Because of the extremely precise control over the location of the camera and the ability to get the exact same "exposure," with no change at all between each image, one can easily create some very impressive stereograms.

Examples: A few intricate polyhedra, and some random scenes.
posted by whatnotever at 10:39 AM on July 29, 2002

So neat. My parents have an old stereoscopic viewer with some cards that go with it. When I was a kid, I played with it a little, then went back to my video games.

These are all very cool links.
posted by rocketman at 11:09 AM on July 29, 2002

Irontom - I know, I was just joking around. The links were indeed good.
posted by kingmissile at 11:37 AM on July 29, 2002

Related post from the past: Viewmaster!
posted by skyscraper at 12:43 PM on July 29, 2002

If you can view these images with your naked eyes (without your head exploding), it's a great way to cheat on those "Spot the Differences" puzzles in your daily newspaper. Go cross-eyed so the two pictures overlap, and any differences between them should be obvious as flickery, half-there spots. Amaze your friends by spotting all the differences in seconds!
posted by Jimbob at 9:05 PM on July 29, 2002