This is a re-post and update of a blog post I wrote some years ago on my old edublogs blog.

You can create simulated 3-D stereoscope photograph by wiggling two slightly different angles of the same pictures, as shown in this picture of my wife & daughter. I’ve been wanting to experiment with this for some time after reading about Wiggle Stereoscopy. I have created this image by showing two successive images in an animated gif picture made with ImageReady.

The two images I am using were not made with this technique in mind, but when I viewed them together it seemed to work. I think it might work better if I kept the camera on the same horizontal plane, rather than changing both horizontal and vertical viewing angle. But like I said, the two images were accidentally made.

We are able to see in 3-D because our two eyes see the world from slightly different angles. A Viewmaster toy is a good example of a true 3-D stereoscope. This technique is only simulated because you aren’t viewing both images at the same time. It’s still pretty cool, isn’t it? What do you think?

The animated fountain gif image shown above was created in Photoshop using two frames. A simple Google search will provide instructions on how to do animated gifs in Photoshop so I won’t go into detail here.

Since my original experiment with wiggle stereoscopes using animated gifs and Photoshop, I’ve also dabbled in creating 3D imagery using AfterEffects. You can see an example of what this looks like below: