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 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.
Thanks. These are cross-eyed, not the originals. The originals viewed with crossed eyes all made holes out of the mountains.
I assure you, given that I made this image, that these are Wall-eyed, and the originals above are cross-eyed.
Thank you, they look amazing
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!
Now I see it! There’s “depth” on the PDA screen too!
Yep. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing, I always say.
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!
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.
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.
Yeah, I’m also seeing them reversed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mountains are deep, land is puffy. Weirded out of that was ever the purpose.
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.
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.”
LOL. Cross-eyed viewing is extremely easy and is very easy to do on both a laptop or desktop display as well as a phone. It takes no strain nor do I need any “devices.”
These images are easy to see and take no effort. It seems like the issue is with you.
Ahhhh this doesn’t work on phones? I also did Wall eyed, works quite easy but the cross eyed hurts lol.
Yes it does work on phones, but it also works on computers. Stop being a peasant and buy a computer.
Hmm, I mean, it works fine for me, but I’ve been viewing stereo images for 15 years, both wall- and cross-eyed, so YMMV. I’ll see if I can quickly edit together some wall-eyed versions of the images for y’all.
Yeah my eyes are prolly not used to crossing or something. When trying the finger thing to cross and merge the dots in the middle, it does works but it hurts to much to keep it stable. Will give it a shot on my PC later. I did toy a lot with wall-eyed ones years ago, so I intuitively started doing that until I noticed a lake on top of a hill in the third one :')
I did end up posting the wall-eyed version of some of them in a top-level comment.
I love these so much thanks! On YouTube there’s also a ton in video format, like this one by Brian May.
Amazing! Thanks!
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.
Same here basically, cross-eyed viewing is super easy for me but I have to work for minutes to perform wall-eyed viewing. I was really excited to see a post with cross-eyed stereograms.
I have to exert constant effort to cross my eyes, don’t you?
Also can’t do parallel, only cross view. I only have to use effort for the first few seconds, as soon as the two images are aligned, my focus snaps to it and I can relax and keep the focus without having to think about it.
It does cause some mild strain if I’m doing it for too long (like going through a book of these), but if I’m cross-eyed for a just a couple of minutes its no problem.
Huh. For me I can very easily wall-eye, I just let my focus drift. Going cross-eyed requires serious and constant strain, and doing the trick with my finger in front of the screen doesn’t work – I can get the dots aligned but if I try to focus on the screen or move my finger I lose it instantly.
Are you farsighted?
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 ?
Parallel are the ones where you put the image between you and your point of focus, instead of your point of focus being between you and the image.
That seems hard to do
I’ve tried it (to get reverse-depth) and didn’t manage to…
Cross eyed is so much more uncomfortable. It also looks smaller than parallel to me.
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.
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 flipswap 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.
Is that available somewhere?
Ah yes! Sorry, the stupid thing is, I knew that and said that to someone else last night! Thank you stranger!
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)
The destruction of the coastline in Honolulu is so sad to see :(
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…
Same - I’m super confused now. I don’t know what I can do anymore. I thought I just crossed my eyes until the images overlap but when I do that I’m seeing a hole too…so I guess not?
That wouldn’t be crossing. Crossing is when you focus your eyes in front of the image. Wall-eyed is where you unfocus your eyes behind the image. Trying to look at your nose is crossing. The way you look at most magic eye images is wall-eyed.
No, there absolutely is some kind of error here via the creation.
I don’t think so. When I cross my eyes, it looks correct. Wall-eyed viewing makes it look like a hole. Crossing your eyes makes them go inward. Wall-eyed makes them go parallel. They’re created specifically for crossing eyes.
You are correct. I know that I am crossing my eyes.
Edit: Well, I filmed it. Apparently only one eye is crossing, which has the same effect of seeing the left image from the right eye etc. I admit I was wrong, but I can usually see these correctly. That one in particular isn’t working in my brain for whatever reason.
Yeah I found the poster’s advice worked well. I.e. hold your finger between your eyes and the image and start focussing on your finger and them drop it away as the dots approach. It made me realize I wasn’t normally crossing my eyes (for say, magic eye images), I was looking past the image and kind of uncrossing my eyes.
With these ones, they definitely work by crossing your eyes.
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!
