This is very cool: you know those images — called stereograms — of weird semi-random patterns that, when you look them, you suddenly see a 3D dinosaur or a planet or something else?
Tip o’ the binoculars to Fark. Warning: many childish remarks, and some NSFW stuff.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
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March 27th, 2007 at 6:56 pm
Yeah!!!
For the first time I was able to see the ‘image’ in one of these. It may have been the ‘animation’ that helped me!
It was a…
Nope, won’t spoil it for those who want to find out for themselves!
Just do as the legend beneath says, and ya’ should be able to ’see’ it!.
Nice clock at the bottom of the page too.
March 27th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
Great pass along site. Thanks Phil.
March 27th, 2007 at 7:08 pm
): I used to be able to see those when I was little, but now I can’t. Waaah!
March 27th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
For all those who can’t see the stereogram- it’s a really neat 3D animation of Liz Hurley doing naked jumps on a trampoline.
All in the name of progress- so it’s totally justified.
March 27th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
Wow! I agree with Old Amateur Astronomer, it must be the animation. I’ve never been able to see those things, either, till now. So cool!
But I didn’t realize Elizabeth Hurley had gills . . . .
March 27th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
…and me, I thought it was Anne Hathaway…
March 27th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
Why can’t I ever see the &$%^(&*@#%^& sailboat?!?!?
March 27th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
That’s not an anaglyph. Anaglyph images are the ones that you wear, for example, red-blue or red-green glasses to view.
March 27th, 2007 at 8:13 pm
When I was a kid I had a computer game called Magic Carpet that could be played entirely in that mode. The screen looked like a swirling mass of green, red, and black pixels but if you focused your eyes right the game would pop out in 3D. I could only play if like that for a couple of minutes before I got a headache, but it was pretty cool while it lasted.
March 27th, 2007 at 8:25 pm
For those who can easily adjust their point of focus, try focusing your eyes _between_ you and the image instead of _behind_ the image. You can generate an inverted version of the sha.. er, Liz Hurley.
March 27th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
It looks like steak crawling across the table…
March 27th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
As Walter said, this is not an anaglyph. It is in fact an autostereogram, aka SIRDS. The wiki page for autostereogram even has the animation on it.
There is a mod available for Quake II (Quake 2 AbSIRD) that transforms the game into one big autostereogram. It’s rather hard to navigate and shoot enemies, but the 3D effect is a unique experience.
March 27th, 2007 at 10:26 pm
Very, very cool. I had to get up close and pull back to see it, though.
March 27th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
First time I tried it I saw a sort of prehistoric f**h-like thing in the foreground and behind it a strange mutant with 4 “spikes” (or fins). I couldn’t duplicate it after that and consistently got the single image.
Now, can someone explain THAT one. (besides the obvious; I’m some kind of freak!)
March 27th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
I would jokingly said it was Anne Coulter, but that’s an insult to the species of the subject of the stereogram.
March 28th, 2007 at 12:44 am
I didn’t see it at first, but then I followed the instructions below the image:
The monitor I am using right now isn’t flat, but the image became visible.
March 28th, 2007 at 1:42 am
I’ve never had a problem seeing these images but my father, now deceased, could never make them out. While looking at this one it just occurred to me that he was colour blind. Would this affect his ability (or that of any one else who is colour blind) to see the hidden image?
March 28th, 2007 at 1:48 am
Amazing! Like several other readers I have never had much luck seeing those things. Normaly I would just get a head ache. This one was easy however. Who knew Elizabeth Hurley could swim like that.
March 28th, 2007 at 2:01 am
I have strabismus and have problems with image conversion, I wonder if that’s why I’ve never been able to see these things, (can you do it with one eye?)
March 28th, 2007 at 2:17 am
I tried to land it with my cursor. It just laughed at the both of them.
March 28th, 2007 at 2:51 am
Colour-blindness shouldn’t stop someone from seeing it, as there are luminance variations, but it may make it a bit harder.
March 28th, 2007 at 2:52 am
bassmanpete,
I don’t think the colourblindness would affect the ability to see it. If you convert any autostereogram to grayscale, the image is still visible but without colour.
March 28th, 2007 at 3:50 am
I always liked the one that looked like a hill, then switched to a big hole in the ground. (or perhaps it was vice versa)That was several years ago. HAven’t seen much along those lines since. Guess I haven’t been looking in the “right” places,,,
GAry 7
March 28th, 2007 at 3:55 am
Oh, TAW. If you have trouble letting go of your tendency to focus on the surface, try first ingesting large quantities of beer. Off times that will work,,,hic,,,
Gary 7
March 28th, 2007 at 4:27 am
@Ibrahim:
My wife has (had?) strabismus, and had surgery on her eyes as a child, and now she only sees with one eye at a time- which rather kills depth perception. If you have a problem with depth perception, you won’t be able to see this type of optical illusion, as it relies on stereoscopic vision.
March 28th, 2007 at 4:27 am
Very good! Excellent, in fact! Thanks for the ref.
Re: colour-blindness, I know a guy who’s blue/yellow colour-blind. He moans greatly about the number of websites that feature blue print on a yellow background because it’s like slightly darker medium grey on slightly lighter medium grey – *very* difficult to read, so he usually gives up and moves on to a more user-friendly site.
Kerrang! magazine used to have cyclamen pink print on a scarlet background – also a pain to read. If one wants one’s writing to be read, it’s a good idea not to put obstacles in the way of one’s potential readers. :-/
Okay, shutting up now.
–
March 28th, 2007 at 4:53 am
# TheBlackCat Says:
March 27th, 2007 at 8:13 pm
When I was a kid I had a computer game called Magic Carpet that could be played entirely in that mode. The screen looked like a swirling mass of green, red, and black pixels but if you focused your eyes right the game would pop out in 3D. I could only play if like that for a couple of minutes before I got a headache, but it was pretty cool while it lasted.
Hey that was exactly the game I thought of when I saw this. It also had a slightly more playable Red/Green anaglyph mode too didn’t it?
March 28th, 2007 at 5:30 am
Pretty neat, but I have to admit: I was expecting to be wowed. I wasn’t :-\
And it’s not color-blindness; I’m color blind (dark green-brown, dark blue-purple) and I never have any problem seeing these things. I think it has more to do if you can cross your eyes on command.
Am I the only one so far who thought the “clock” at the bottom of the page was cooler than the autostereogram? Maybe so…
March 28th, 2007 at 5:36 am
Hear Hear Mark! I think I spent more time looking at the “clock” at the bottom of the page than at the animation that lead me there in the first place.
March 28th, 2007 at 5:42 am
Heh, cool… these things give me a headache after a while…
March 28th, 2007 at 5:54 am
I can remember when these were all the fashion in shopping malls. I could never see them. This time however I think I saw the image.
Ger
March 28th, 2007 at 7:00 am
I think it’s the HypnoToad.
March 28th, 2007 at 7:06 am
Nobody identified it yet? It’s an animation of a shark swimming to the left with it’s head kind of wagging back and forth. It’s not a very good animation being kind of jerky and on a quick loop. I’d like to see someone make a longer smoother one.
March 28th, 2007 at 7:10 am
websites that feature blue print on a yellow background
I’m not color blind and I hate those.
March 28th, 2007 at 7:11 am
Was that a Mallrats reference? *giggle*
I love these things, and have always wondered how hard they are to create. Particularly an animated one.
As for the clock, after following the link, I want one. My favorite is the one that was on the site, but I also like the hand-drawn clock. Pretty nifty.
March 28th, 2007 at 7:25 am
I, too, was more wow-ed by the clock, and followed the link to the clock page. The handwritten on was neat, too, but I think it would get a little annoying after a bit.
March 28th, 2007 at 8:08 am
I was unimpressed.
Is there a reason that these caught on instead of true stereoscopic images/videos (where you see two images/movies side by side and ‘merge’ them into a 3D version by relaxing/crossing your eyes)? With those you get perfect sharpness, color, etc, while these noisy ’stereograms’ only provide vaguely defined shapes. I’ve never understood that…
March 28th, 2007 at 8:28 am
I think part of the gimmick is that you don’t know what you’ll see until you see it.
March 28th, 2007 at 8:59 am
Nicholas, I’m with you on the true stereograms vs. random dot stereograms. Maybe it’s the whole “secretive” aspect of a hidden image that makes the random dot images more popular. But true stereograms are mucho-cooler. And yeah, I thought the clock at the bottom was cooler.
March 28th, 2007 at 9:01 am
Dr. Plaitt not a NASA employee . . .
How did you end up on their website?
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030923.html
–Sarah
March 28th, 2007 at 9:24 am
Whadda ya mean caught on? Can’t remember when I last saw one (apart from this one that I saw only a few minutes ago:-)).
When they first came out you couldn’t kick you way through book shops for books full of white-noise pictures and every other shareware /freeware program enabled you to create rude words hidden in a blizzard and even animations like the one BA linked to here.
Everywhere you went people were holding up books at arms length to resolve the hidden object, some even tried to make sense out of the bar codes in the supermarkets.
And then after a couple of years it all went away, just like Alf, and you only come across them when people like BA gets nostalgic.
I dismiss true stereograms from gaining popularity, simply because we humans are lazy, we don’t want to concentrate to hard when we are looking at pictures and movies. It will go the way of the multiple angles feature of DVDs, it will only be used for a very narrow audience.
What I really want to know, is what happened to the glasses with two differently polarized glasses enabling you to see 3-D movies in color, rather than the red/blue ones that still seem to dominate.
March 28th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
I figured animation would make it harder to see. It usually takes me a fair bit of time to get focused in, I figured the changing pattern would make that more difficult. Funny how some of you found it easier.
S., the Astronomy Picture Of the Day site is hosted by Goddard SFC, but they use as sources any number of hosts with astronomy content. They do not exclusively post NASA content, but rather look for anything interesting about astronomy to which to draw attention.
I also agree the reason these took off in popularity was the hidden content element, and they lost popularity because of the effort required to force focus. Once the novelty wore off, the overload factor kicked in and people tuned them out.
March 28th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
Does being partly color-blind interfere with this? I try and try, but I can’t see a thing. Heck, half the time, I can’t see a thing in the still images.
March 28th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
I know this is late but everyone please check out this website. http://www.leweyg.com/download/SIRD/index.html
it makes that simple animation look childish.
March 28th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
All I could see was a shark-shaped hole
March 28th, 2007 at 7:20 pm
I saw it!! This is the first time in my life I’ve been able to see one of those things…. it’s so cool! It took me about four tries, but then it just popped into place. I could move my head, I could focus my eyes, and it just kept on swimming.
If you’re having trouble seeing it, the angle of your head relative to the screen may affect it. It’s a lot easier to see if your head is straight forward and up a modest degree. If you hunch down or strain up, it’s harder to see it.
March 28th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
Heh, back in 91 or so, a local magazine mentioned them (thankfully along with a full article on what the hell was up, not that it’s that hard to describe). A week later I managed to make one (from scratch – C and a laserjet, no drivers, no nothing) and bolted down to show my dad my half-sphere on a plane. He couldn’t see it, and then felt there were residual dots (those blinking one eye but not the other) and I berated him royally. He was right and I corrected that later. Anyhow, I showed my ubernerd friends at school (and why wouldn’t I) and one made an animated one on his HP48S (toldya we were pretty geeky in high school. Ok, and now too). It was a cube bouncing around (pong style), but with the 1.5×1″ or so screen, it was not the easiest thing to see. We were speculating about trying to make something out of that, but, well, we never did. Yet.
March 28th, 2007 at 10:21 pm
I don’t see it. I do see several layers that appear to be moving in opposing directions, as well as the “shark shaped hole” that someone else mentioned. Given the subject matter, I’m a bit disappointed with my eyes.
March 29th, 2007 at 3:31 am
I normally get the image, especially Liz Hurley, maybe after some trying, but this time I was stumped. The wife also had it on her monitor, and I could immediately resolve it, but at the larger image size, (I normally have the 21″ monitor at 1600 x 1200 resolution – her’s is a 17″ running 1024 x 768 pixels).
I guess the difference is the physical size of the image, requiring quite similar operating difference between the viewer’s eyes to adequately resolve the autostereogram. In other words, it cannot be too large or too small. (Or can it? Maybe a multiple of that “between the eyes” distance will work for murals, as I seem to remember that craze years ago with poster size images.)
So for those who cannot “see” it, try another size monitor, or change the monitor resolution to give a larger image that more closely resembles the steroscopic difference reference for the image.
Ivan.
March 29th, 2007 at 5:36 am
I did eventually get it to appear on the smaller size image, if fact, even on the highest res. I have – 2000 x 1600 pixels. (This yields a very small image on the screen, as opposed to the result at 800 x 600.)
But I also discovered another interesting thing. If you place your cursor anywhere on the moving image, click and hold for a moment and then move it a few pixels, the moving image will freeze. This image can be further dragged, but why would you? I don’t think anything further could be done with it. But the image is always the one shot, ie, with What’s-her-names’ head always in the same position.
Oh, and I like some of the clocks, they’re cute.
Ivan.
March 29th, 2007 at 11:11 am
I SEE 5 LIGHTS!!!
March 29th, 2007 at 11:50 am
[...] (via Bad Astronomy) [...]
March 30th, 2007 at 8:07 am
That was cool – I’ve never seen an animated one. Ain’t the Internet great? (Ditto on the “not an anaglyph” though.) But great link!
March 30th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
My head hurts !!!
March 31st, 2007 at 9:50 am
The “hole instead of bulge” thing occurs when you watch it cross eyed rather then parallel eyed. They are designed so that, besides the edges, another “input” from reality that would also be consistent with it is a 3d object. Most are designed so that looking far behind (the directions of each eye more parallel to each other then what would be reasonable looking at it as a flat object as it in reality is) would be consistent with the object intended beyond focus. Luckily, with not-too-deep objects and a bit of practice the brain can be made to accept that while the focus doesn’t quite match the eye angle – yay brain! However this also incidentally matches an “inverted along the z axis” object with the eyes crossed, the left seeing what is intended for the right and vice versa. It’s possible to design them to match this and some people find them much easier to view (then presenting the inverse shark hole to us others who prefer parallel).
April 3rd, 2007 at 10:18 am
Unlike paired image viewing, when I look at these stereo pictures inverted, I get weird shapes. In this case, I see two objects instead of the intended one: assuming the flat background is 100 units away, there’s a body-shaped blob at about 50 units, and a 5-finned fish at about 75 units.
I personally like these images better than paired viewing simply because they don’t hurt my eyes as badly. I don’t know anything about how these are made, but I suspect there are “stripes” of left/right information, instead of having the entire left image on one side and the right image on the other side. If so, these images allow the eyes to view images in a mostly relaxed state, while paired viewing requires the eye muscles to hold the eyes much farther from relaxed*. Also, you can view much larger images this way than with paired viewing, and change the focus within the window. * Proper paired viewing with lenses mounted to my head is actually better, but just displaying two images side-by-side on screen is hard on my eyes.
I cannot view 3D data with only one eye–I can’t even see a 2D outline or anything. I tried looking with both eyes then maintaining while covering one eye and it still didn’t work. Also, I think some of the problem with seeing the image may be due to focusing abilities; normally, your eye lenses focus to a certain distance while your eye balls simultaneously aim so the views intersect at that distance. Since these images require your lenses to focus at one distance (that of your monitor) while your eyes aim to intersect farther or closer, strongly coordinated eyes will have a harder time seeing the image, while “weaker” coordination can be manipulated easily.
I grabbed the frames, and it’s harder for me to see an individual frame than the motion image, though I can reduce the image resolution further on the frame and still see 3D than I can with the motion image.
May 16th, 2007 at 9:10 am
Wow that’s amazing. It’s adding the 4th dimension of time to 3D image on the anaglyph plane. Far out.
July 3rd, 2008 at 8:20 am
chek out http://www.pixelperfect3d.com