Since we're doing magic eyes now...

About 21 years ago (😩) I made a stereoscopic photo for some online contest. I was pretty proud of it.
Edit: please ignore the fact that the light doesn’t match between the shots!
- Ooh, nice depth!
  
  Thanks! It was a pain to set up the little screen trick but for what it’s worth, I won the contest!
- I remember my HP IPAQ, it was my first mobile computing device. That thing was so much fun.
  
  I was mildly obsessed. It felt like the future! I miss technology like that. I’m kinda excited for all this AR stuff people are talking about because I haven’t really been excited by the latest and greatest shiny black rectangle in a long time.
- That is really cool and the PDA screen is such a cool effect!
- It is a good one. Although my eyes kept trying to focus on the keyboad and failing

Why do all of these look inverted to me? Like, what should be a mountain is a deep hole in the ground.
- These are cross-view, your probably using the focus at infinity trick instead.
  
  Wow, I had the same problem as the one you replied to and I thought you were making a joke I didn't get but I stand corrected. You were absolutely 100% right.
  Turns out I was focusing at infinity, didn't even realize it was a different thing than crossing my eyes until I tried to cross my eyes first before focusing on the pictures...
  Very cool, thanks.
  
  Yeah, I'm also seeing them reversed.
  
  Yup. That was exactly it. I was thinking "I know how to do these" and not even paying attention to the instructions at the bottom.
  
  Wow I had no idea it could be done that way. Just tried doing it and the image is way blurrier when 'inverted'. I am near sighted. Does this mean it applies to illusions too?

Since some people are apparently rather salty about these being cross-eyed, despite the fact that that's just how NASA made them, here, special for y'all, a selection:
- These ones are... different. When I use these ones the mountain ridges appear to dip inwards? Away from the screen. This was not the case for the ones in the main post
  EDIT: I figured out the reason: i'm still going cross-eyed to view them. In the cross-eyed ones, you are taking the left image in the right eye and the right image in the left eye, but in the wall-eyed one you are supposed to take them in reverse. So if you look at the wall-eyed one cross-eyed, the depths are going to all be reversed for you.
  EDIT 2: to get the wall-eyed ones to work correctly, I had get a piece of mail and physically seperate my eyes from one another with it. The sensation of going wall-eyed was exactly the same as crossing my eyes, but the results were now correct.
- Thank you so much! This is so much easier for me.
  I wasn't going to complain or anything, but this post made me realize that I'm actually incapable of viewing cross-eyed. It actually hurt my eye sockets to try.
  
  I also personally prefer wall-eyed viewing, but these just happened to be cross-eyed originally, so I was surprised by the complaints.
- These are rad. Excellent post.
- Thank you, they look amazing
- Thanks. These are cross-eyed, not the originals. The originals viewed with crossed eyes all made holes out of the mountains.
  
  Allow me to word it differently: people are salty that the originals posted above are Cross-eyed, so these are wall-eyed (like I said in the image itself.
  The images in the top-level comment are distinctly not for cross-eyed viewing, since the originals were cross-eyed.

Boo, these are cross-view, not parallel-view.
- I can still view these, but it’s much much harder for me.
  I don’t know why parallel isn’t the default.
  
  It varies per person. I for one can't view wall-eyed, only cross-eyed.
  
  Lots of people can really easily go cross-eyed and look at these with no practice whatsoever. Fewer people can do the parallel kind with no practice or with the amount of practice they've already done.
  
  What is parallel ?
  
  Cross eyed is so much more uncomfortable. It also looks smaller than parallel to me.
- I grew up with the Magic Eye books and have never been able to do cross-view as a result.
- If you want wall-eyed viewing, you can just download the image and ~~mirror flip~~ swap it in an image editor. I also personally prefer wall-eyed viewing.
  This is exactly how JPL posted them, and they did cross-eyed viewing because the image jumps out of the page, rather than in (I presume).
  
  Incorrect. You don't mirror flip it, you swap the images to convert between cross/parallel view.
  Source: I wrote my own stereogram software, I know the difference.
- I can never get the parallel view to work. My eyes want to focus too quickly. :( cross view is so much easier to me. I wish they came in both all the time.

Not sure why but those NEVER work for me lol
Not this, not magic eye books, absolutely nothing works.
Tried for many hours back in the day
- I can only do parallel-view, not crosseyed, those look so surreal that way (inverted height/depth basically)
  
  Is that why I'm seeing things that way? Don't understand the difference really, but is really odd to see Mt St Helens as a sinkhole instead.
  
  Works opposite for me. Cross-eyed versions look correct, and the parallel/wall versions have inverted depth.
  Same thing with magic eye images, they're always inverted, like I'm looking into a mold of what the object is supposed to be.
- I tried so long I tried every method, never worked for me. Then eventually I found an image that made it work for me
  https://i.redd.it/25c330mmohu51.jpg
  (Sorry for the Reddit link). How I do it: put your phone screen right before your nose and unfocus your eyes. Then, don't move your eyes, don't move your focus, but slowly move the phone away from your face. At about 10-20cm distance, you should be able to see a squirrel with a nut in its hands.
  After that it became very easy to do other pictures simply by knowing what to expect (an actual 3d image).
  That being said the one above is really hard.
- If you have astigmatism or greatly different lens prescriptions per eye, it may be very hard for it to work.
  If you do have astigmatism, you can kind of 'squeeze' or scrunch your eyelids down to compensate as you cross your eyes, and it may work better without glasses and closer up
  Some people it just never works with
- Do you happen to have a dominant eye? If you primarily use one eye over the other I dont believe these work. For me, I have a scar in the middle of one eye that prevents most straight ahead vision, so its only used to add peripheral information.

How to make people on the internet staring at their phones like this:
Worked well for me. Cool stuff!

In feudal Japon, 19th century, a photographer made a lot of photos from the people in 3D to use in a viewer, hand colored.
(Converted to gif, to see the 3D effect without eye acrobatics)
- I have one of these stereoscopes! It came with a bunch of nature scenes, but a few slides had 1800s 3D porn too!
  
  Porn exist since photography and also before, even in 3D, only technology has improved

!crossview@lemmy.world
It’s not very active, but still has good content.

For some reason I'm getting the depth inverted. Mt. Saint Helens looks like a hole in the ground.
- You're doing "wall eyed" viewing. These are for "cross-eyed" viewing. "Wall-eyed" means your eyes are focusing at a point behind the image. You need to cross your eyes for these. Try putting your finger in between your screen and your eyes, varying the distance until the dots merge. Then, remove your finger, focusing on the image itself. That should allow for cross-eyed viewing.
  
  That's so weird, I always thought I was crossing my eyes when doing this...
  
  Thanks that was it. I can lock in and focus the wall style very fast, as it is the most common. This took me while but got it with the finger trick!

These are all backwards. The eyes are reversed so everything that's supposed to be a hole looks like a bump and vice-versa.
EDIT : TIL about cross v wall eyed. I dont understand why they would do it this way though ? The image is much less stable, and moving it at all completely breaks the effect. Wall-eyed really allows you to move and observe details without breaking.
- You're doing "wall eyed" viewing. These are for "cross-eyed" viewing. "Wall-eyed" means your eyes are focusing at a point behind the image. You need to cross your eyes for these. Try putting your finger in between your screen and your eyes, varying the distance until the dots merge. Then, remove your finger, focusing on the image itself. That should allow for cross-eyed viewing.
  
  Focusing at a point behind the image is exactly what we've always done for every other magic eye poster because it only requires relaxing your eyes (staring off into the distance) for the image to pop into focus. Cross eyed viewing is damn near impossible on any screen at less than an arm's length away without significant eye strain or external devices (like the stereoscopic viewers that photogrammetrists would use to view these kinds of images without inducing a migraine) and since the dot is on top holding a finger up as a guide ends up obstructing the entire view unless your arms are growing out of your forehead. The wall eyed view has none of these issues.
  I appreciate the post and your effort. But, the images themselves are frustrating and have killed my initial reaction, which was to share them further. Because I'm nearly the only person I know that wouldn't loose interest in the explanation for "correct viewing" half way through. If they were wall eyed stereoscopic images, I could just say "Magic Eye", they'd remember Mallrats, see the schooner, and go "Ooh neat."
  
  Ahhhh this doesn't work on phones? I also did Wall eyed, works quite easy but the cross eyed hurts lol.
- For a lot of people cross eyed views are easier, they would probably give similar complaints for a wall eyed view. It depends a lot on how your eye muscles behave
- Mountains are deep, land is puffy. Weirded out of that was ever the purpose.

I love these so much thanks! On YouTube there's also a ton in video format, like this one by Brian May.
- Amazing! Thanks!

Really can’t seem to understand how this works.
Never did any “magic eyes” or whatever books as a kid, so maybe I just don’t have any practice in this, but whether I try to cross my eyes focusing beyond the screen, or “above” the screen, I can’t get the resulting middle image to look like anything other than a blur.
Perhaps my eyes are somehow odd on the other hand. I don’t need glasses though, so I’m a bit skeptical that’s it.
I tried all the guides I found in this thread, including the floating hot dogs, attempting varying distances both with the screen and the finger, then trying the wall-eyed variants too for all of them, none of them work for me.
So odd. It seems it should work. No idea what I am doing wrong here.
Or is this the joke? To get people to squint for minutes on end on their screen?
- I promise this isn't a troll. In your case, it may be that your eyes are having difficulty focusing on nonexistent objects. If they're blurry, it's not that your eyes aren't crossing, but rather that they are out-of-focus. Eyes naturally focus the lenses to bring near or distant objects into clarity, but when I was first doing magic eye images a long time ago, it also took me a while to convince my eyes that they needed to focus on the images.
  My guess is that, since the actual images are on the screen at distance A, but your eyes are crossing as if they're looking at distance B, your eyes are auto-focusing for objects at B, but the images are still actually at A, so they appear out-of-focus.
- I used to be able to do them at will, and even overlap images an additional time to get a crazy second level of shape.
  But now I can’t, thanks to the american health insurance industry. yay!
- They do work. It takes some practice to get them though. At first I used a pencil or something to focus on while I made the two dots merge together, stayed focussed on the pencil until my brain "saw" the image behind it, then it sort of locked in and I could take the pencil away. I've done so many of them now that I can just go crosseyed to bring the dots together, then look at the middle picture.
  The 3D image works by tricking your brain into seeing a third image that isn't really there. We're used to constructing 3D images from two slightly different views; we do it all the time, so the two images are slightly different and when overlaid use the same mechanism to make you think it's 3D.
- I was gonna tell you it was a meme and they don't actually work. This being in science meme I thought they might actually be stereographic images, but it's from so far away you wouldn't be able to discern any 3D-ness. But I was wrong the height is exaggerated. For me the walleyed version worked for me, I just had to zoom in on one image and hold my phone quite far away.

It's a schooner!
- You dumb bastard, it's not a schooner it's a sailboat.
  
  A schooner IS a sail boat, STUPID HEAD

I miss r/crossview and the short love r/crossviewnsfw. Damn greed ruining everything good in the world.

Isn't magic eye something different? I thout it was !autostereograms@lemmy.world instead of cross view images.
- You are correct, they are slightly different, but are based on the same effect of stereo imaging.

The destruction of the coastline in Honolulu is so sad to see :(

Cool effect. For me, it only works on a screen where the white dots are roughly the distance of my eyes. So not on a phone.

I don't think the locations are all correct.
JPL Source Link
1st: Honolulu, Hawaii
2nd: Lake Palanskoye, Kamchatka Peninsula, Russian Federation
3rd: Wheeler Ridge, California
4th: Mount St. Helens, Washington State
5th: Mount Meru, Tanzania
6th: Salt Lake City, Utah
7th: Meseta de Somuncura, Patagonia, Argentina
8th: Wellington, New Zealand
- Hmm, you are correct with the identifications, but the order I see in voyager is the one I've posted:
  The only ones where I think we differ are 2 & 3. I'm pretty sure that the top one in my screenshot is wheeler ridge.

I have never ever in my life managed to make these work, I have no idea what's wrong with my eyes
- you and me both. i can make the third dot appear, but the second i look away from it the effect is gone. and now my eyes hurt!
  
  Normally it means you picked the wrong distance to the screen!
  Tinker with that first - it might be much further or closer than you think, all depending on your screen and eyes.
  Also, a hint: the central circle should stay straight in the middle, not closer to one or the other. At that point, below there will be three equally sized pictures, and then you can switch your sight to the central one.
  
  Try using a bigger screen, or moving your screen further from your face. When moving your focus off the dot, move it to the closest part of the image and then move from there. It can help to align a feature in your periphery before moving to it.

Awesome! I cross-posted this to !crossview@lemmy.world :)
- Subbed! Thanks!

TIL I am a walleyed viewer

Oh, also, I really miss the old JMOL molecular models that you could view in cross- or wall-eyed stereo. Anyone know what software is required to make those?

Dude, these are dope! Thank you!
Wow! Super depth!

These are easier for me than normal Magic Eye pictures, because I can just use the "floating hotdog"* method of putting it right up to my face, letting my eyes get used to being focused there and then slowly moving away from it until it pops out of the page/screen.
*(to do the "floating hotdog" trick, put your index fingers end to end then put them right up in your eye line. Now slightly move your fingers apart until the floating hotdog appears)

Ha, there is NO depth to this kind of thing it is just an illusion, don't be fooled about what these tricky scientists say.

I usually can do stereograms pretty well but for some reason I had to tilt my phone about 10° counter-clockwise for the stereo images to align to get the 3D effect.
- Have you ever had your vision checked?

Well, its the first time that i manage to see one of these magic eye images.... but I need to ask. Most of this seem to be inverted (i see mountains as sinks, lakes and rivers are higher than peaks). Is this intended? I'm interpretint it wrong?
- These ones require crossing your eyes, whereas the other type you relax them (like looking further away).
  I find the other type way easier and struggle with cross eye ones. For these images you could swap the left and right portions to get it working the other way.
  
  Actually, I made a version for wall-eyed viewing in one of the other top-level comments.

- Thanks for the additional examples!
  Is the last one (lion statue & building) a reprojection? I didn't see depth (or parallax) in the background, just between the lion and the building.
  Here are some fun ones of cerebral anatomy from neuroimaging.org:
  
  Oh, that is SO COOL! Do you have any more anatomical pictures in stereo?
- Ah, thanks for the edit. I still think that these have greater value from a scientific perspective, but I do also have a collection of many stereo images that I could post here for you! They're MUCH older, though:
  Sorry for the poor quality here! It's difficult to take nice scans of these since they're curved with age. OH, also, these are wall-eyed, not cross-eyed.
- I agree with the general sentiment, though I believe that the value of these images from the perspective of scientific appreciation outweighs traditional Magic Eye images. I remember, ten years later on, how my professor for the geology intro course let us see images taken over Germany by British intelligence, and you could literally see how they used the stereography to find missiles, because you'd be looking at a bunch of flat terrain and then bam, there's a weird thing poking up out of the ground near that farmhouse. Then, she showed us some of these, and showed us how you could compare the topography in these to those on the topo maps. From a "wow" factor, not everything is going to be as flashy as a Royal Institution Christmas lecture, but this is what science looks like.
  ETA: Wait, what do you mean "out-of-focus"?
  
  At my work, we maintain computers for a bio lab that use Nvidia glasses to view stereo images of cryogenically frozen protein structures.
  Nvidia doesn't support them anymore, and there was an email thread that was forwarded to us by the lab manager of some scientists discussing the issue. One of them suggested to the others that they could just cross their eyes and see the images that way instead of using the glasses. Funny stuff!
- The third from the end to the beginning is quite spectacular showing the effect. I'd put that one first, honestly.

I’m cross eyed. Can’t get a third dot. Boooooooo
- Did you try the wall-eyed versions below? Those should be smaller on a mobile screen, and many people (myself included) find wall-eyed versions easier.
  
  No I didn’t. Thank you. I’ll check it out.

This is a great way to teach people how to do the Magic Eye puzzles. It's the same method but was notably easier to do this than a Magic Eye.
- This is actually the opposite method you're supposed to use. If you cross your eyes to see a Magic Eye photo, the image will be inverted/inside out.
  To view a Magic Eye, you're supposed to look through the image. Personally I was never able to pull it off. These cross-eyed images are a lot easier.
  
  I was wondering why it seemed inverted to me. I saw crevasses instead of mountains, but it didn't make sense
  
  Because of your comment I was finally able to do the magic eye!!!!! I can flip back and forth between them and invert the mountains. Thank you!!!
- I'm glad it helped!