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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How did you end up on their website?

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030923.html

–Sarah

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…

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.

I’m not color blind and I hate those.