A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
My time has come!
The above stereographic image is for cross-eyed viewing (most stereograms are wall-eyed, so you may need to put your finger in front of your screen until this one comes into focus)
This is an image of Honolulu, Hawaii, published by NASA. Note Diamond Head (the volcanic crater) in the south.
Here are some other stereopairs published by JPL:
Wheeler Ridge, California
Mount Saint Helens
Salt Lake Valley, Utah
Wellington, New Zealand
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)
How to make people on the internet staring on their phones like this:
Worked well for me. Cool stuff!
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 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.
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, 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.
These are rad. Excellent post.
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!
It is a good one. Although my eyes kept trying to focus on the keyboad and failing
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!
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 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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
Yupp, I never got the hang of cross-eyed viewing, even with the tips that are around, whereas the "looking through the image" technique is super easy for me, basically just relaxing my eyes. I assume there's people where it is the other way around, and the cross-eyed method works better for them.
Basically it's about which image is transferred as information from which of your eyes, and the two different techniques swap the eyes, which also swaps the 3D depth information.
I love the Wellington here viewed the "wrong" way - like the ocean is a massive plateau surrounding the coast, with that strip of developed area rising like another giant wall.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
The destruction of the coastline in Honolulu is so sad to see :(
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)
For some reason I'm getting the depth inverted. Mt. Saint Helens looks like a hole in the ground.
