Time-for-space stereo photography

Some years ago I was intrigued by the technique of producing photographs that rapidly alternate a pair of images, one for the left eye and one for the right to give a 3D effect:

This is essentially a pair of Stereo Viewer pictures but without the need of a ‘View-Master’ viewer to give a sense of depth to the picture. Although I recall this had been tried with television back in the 70s or 80s (and been a massive flop) the inspiration for these came from Jim Gasperini’s page where he calls them “Time for Space Wiggle” stereo images.

I thought I would try some myself by taking a photo then moving an eye distance to the right for the second image. It works best if there is a foreground subject such as a tree or person and a background, rather than just a distant scene.

The two photos are then stitched together into an animated gif.

It’s not hard to make these time-for-space images for yourself. I used the wonderful open source “Swiss Army knife” of command line image processing, ImageMagick.

After installation (check it is in your path) type the following to combine the pair:

C:\path\to>magick convert -delay 1 -loop 0 lefteyephoto.jpg righteyephoto.jpg

To make it more convenient I placed the command into a DOS batch file stereo.bat as shown below. This also reduces the stereo image to a quarter of the original’s size.

@echo off
REM **** Generate 'time-for-space' stereo image from two photos taken about 100mm apart
REM **** Commandline arguments are Left-eye image followed by right-eye image (as JPEGs)
REM **** Uses the convert.exe command from the ImageMagick suite  http://www.imagemagick.org
REM **** Steve  15/09/2009
magick convert %1.jpg -resize 25%% temp_001.gif
magick convert %2.jpg -resize 25%% temp_002.gif
magick convert -delay 1 -loop 0 temp_*.gif animated_25percent.gif

Then just use it like
C:\path\to\photos>stereo lefteyephoto righteyephoto

and open the produced animated_25percent.gif image by dragging it into a browser tab.

Without a tripod and slide mechanism it can be difficult to get the pair to line up perfectly, but the results aren’t too bad, as shown here. A graphics editor could be used to introduce or remove rotation to level the image, and perhaps translate the images but I’ve found if you take a series of say 8 pictures moving an eye-distance each time, you may get a pair of consecutively good ones out of it.

I hope you enjoy them and if you do some of your own please drop me a comment below.

Here are some more from Tasmania and also near Wee Jasper, NSW