this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
463 points (96.4% liked)

Science Memes

15785 readers
4089 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 minutes ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

Dude, these are dope! Thank you!

Wow! Super depth!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 minutes ago

I was wondering why it seemed inverted to me. I saw crevasses instead of mountains, but it didn't make sense

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 hours ago

I'm glad it helped!

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 20 minutes ago

I have one of these stereoscopes! It came with a bunch of nature scenes, but a few slides had 1800s 3D porn too!

[–] [email protected] 15 points 13 hours ago

How to make people on the internet staring on their phones like this:

Worked well for me. Cool stuff!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 14 hours ago (4 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

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!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (4 children)

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:

[–] [email protected] 6 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 13 hours ago

Thank you, they look amazing

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

Thanks. These are cross-eyed, not the originals. The originals viewed with crossed eyes all made holes out of the mountains.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

When I view the originals cross-eyed, I see all the mountains as holes in the ground. I'm sure that's not the intended effect. Try it!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Define "Cross-eyed". I get the impression that your definition is not the same as mine. Cross-eyed viewing is specifically shifting your eyes so that they would be focused on an object closer to you than your screen. Wall-eyed viewing is the term used for shifting your eyes so they would be focused on an object behind your screen. The originals above, as the text in the original NASA photos says, require you to cross your eyes. The images I have posted in this top-level comment require you to look through the screen at the wall. I don't know what else to tell you. You're just wrong. I've been doing this for fifteen years. The US Government has been doing it since the second world war. I think that, given that the current administration is made up entirely of cross-eyed imbeciles, we can probably take their word for it that something is cross-eyed?

But, since just telling you to read the things I have already posted didn't work last time, take a look at the difference between the CrossView and Parallel Viewing (wall-eyed) communities here on Lemmy. If you still don't believe me, I cannot help you.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I know the definitions. The cross-eyed method is way easier for me than the wall-eyed one. It's not that I don't want to believe you, friend. I'm just reporting what I saw. Did you check the picks yourself with both methods? I did.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Yes, I made the second set. I have been looking at the originals since I found them months ago. Here, let's do a test. jmol generated this image as "cross-eyed". Do you agree?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

This works perfectly for me with the cross-eyed approach, yes.

No disrespect meant when I asked if you tested your pictures. You know, it IS possible to swich the pictutes without testing, so it made sense to ask.

Thanks for being patient and troubleshooting my apparent viewing anomaly.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

Very strange, because I can move from this image of PCl5 directly to the honolulu image in the OP and it works just fine. Meanwhile, if I move from there to the "are you not entertained" image, it makes the images go into the page, since they're wall-eyed images.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 21 hours ago

These are rad. Excellent post.

[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago

It is a good one. Although my eyes kept trying to focus on the keyboad and failing

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Thanks! It was a pain to set up the little screen trick but for what it’s worth, I won the contest!

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Why do all of these look inverted to me? Like, what should be a mountain is a deep hole in the ground.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago (5 children)

These are cross-view, your probably using the focus at infinity trick instead.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago

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?

[–] u_u 13 points 1 day ago

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.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I can only do parallel-view, not crosseyed, those look so surreal that way (inverted height/depth basically)

[–] CoopaLoopa 2 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (12 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

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

load more comments (11 replies)
[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 day ago (19 children)

Boo, these are cross-view, not parallel-view.

load more comments (19 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›