Magic eyes and me
I carefully constructed some stereographs by hand in MS Paint way back in 10th grade, and more recently wrote a program to make them in Matlab. The script is too crude for me to put here but I would be glad to send it to you if you ask. Click pictures for the larger versions. If you like 3D stuff then you would like my 3D video of the northern lights.
This should look like a 3D elevation map of Antarctica, it was made by the script from the grayscale picture below.
Penguins photo courtesy of Galen Frysinger, and Antarctica map from Jamey Jones.
This one is classic, it spells my name out, Lansey
The long-winded story
The story of Magic Eyes and me is best told with a timeline. When I was little I spent some time figuring out how we have depth perception. When I found stereoscopic photos in elementary school, I thought they were a great idea and I even drew some crude stereoscopic pairs by hand on graph paper. In 10th grade and with the help of some relatively simple stereograms in my brothers book from the "Magic Eye" © series, I was able to make a few by hand in MS Paint. (Should I say by mouse?) Rather painstaking, I was in the middle of making a 3D guitar "masterpiece" when then the headaches came on so I quit working on it. Some finished examples are at the bottom.
A cousin of mine is related one of the original magic eye programmers who made the books. He explained the algorithm to me but I had no idea how to implement it. Then in 2007 I had the skills to put a program together to do the job.
Stereograms by Hand (Mouse?)
Crude letters should spells out my last name, "Lansey"
Before
using photoshop. notice the height changes in steps.
I avoid the steps problem in this kind of picture by horizontal
stretching but the 3D effect is not quite as strong.
Here is an interesting bit of trivia, the distance between the eyepieces on some fancy Binoculars is considerably less than the distance between the big lenses out front (see diagram below). This exaggerates depth perception greatly. Pay attention next time you look through one.
