Anaglyphs

Anaglyphs are 3D images created by taking two pictures of a scene, one with a red lense and one with a blue. These 3D images can be viewed with the Red/Blue 3D glasses. Anyway, I wrote a program which can combine two bitmaps into a red/blue anaglyph and created some pictures by taking a picture with a digital camera, carefully moving the camera about 7cm or so to the right and taking a second picture. The BMP's that can be fed into this program can be either color or black and white, the program will take care of both. You can download the source code, Windows executable, or view some samples by clicking on the links below:

anaglyph-0.90.tar.gz (Source code)
anaglyph-0.90.zip (Windows Exe)

kitchen1.jpg - This is my kitchen.
office.jpg - This is the office I work at.
steve.jpg - Styven.
jenn.jpg - Jenn.
jenn2.jpg - Jenn #2 (using different camera spacing/angles).
oldtv.jpg - My old 1980's tv.

You can buy 3D glasses from this site: http://stereoscopy.com/reel3d/anaglyph-glasses.html

Stereograms (Magic Eye Pictures)

Stereograms (also called Magic Eye pics) are pictures that when you stare at them, something will pop out in 3D. No special glasses needed :). The trick to these images is to slightly cross your eyes while staring at the image, or to focus your eye on something that would be closer than the image (or is it futher away.. hmmm). It might take some practice to be able to see these.

Anyway, to use this program, you give it a normal image (2 or more colors) and the program will create a stereogram based on this. The program will scan from left to right and if it sees a new color it will raise that part of the image forward until it sees the previous color. In other words, on the sample picture below, the program will always see the color white first (the background color). If the program is working on the center of the screen, as the program scans right, it will see the color black. At that point it will pull the image forward. When it sees red it will pull the image forward again. When it sees black again, it will push the image back in, etc. etc. The two pictures below show a before and after:

The image before running through the stereogram program
The image after running through the stereogram program

The way this program works is, for every line of the image it creates a random pattern of colored dots (with a default length of 30 dots) and repeats this pattern across the image. Any place that you want to pop forward, you add an extra dot to the pattern and anywhere you want to appear further away from the viewer, you remove a dot from the pattern. Note that the pattern of dots keep the same colors, there's just one more dot (of a random color) or one less. Sorry for the bad explanation :(. Anyway, the stereogram program has 2 options:

Usage: stereogram [ -options ] <image.bmp> <output image.bmp>
   -width <pattern width (default 30) >
   -delta <num pixel change (default 3) >

So to make the image above I just typed:

./stereogram mike3.bmp stereo3.bmp

Note that the input and output files must be BMP's. If you wanted the pattern of pixels to be 40 instead of 30 and you wanted to remove/add 7 pixels from the image in a depth change, you could type:

./stereogram -width 40 -delta 7 mike3.bmp stereo3.bmp

Note: The version from February 2005 had a bug where it was creating the bmp images wrong, especially if the input image wasn't a multiple of 4. This should be fixed in the November 2, 2005 version.