NYPL Labs : Stereogranimator

Create and share animated GIFs and 3D anaglyphs using more than 40,000 stereographs from The New York Public Library.

Since I’ve spent a fair bit of time animating gifs for DS106 of late this was interesting.

Stereoscopic photography recreates the illusion of depth by utilizing the binocularity of human vision. Because our two eyes are set apart, each eye sees the world from a slightly different angle. Our brains combine these two different eye-images into one, a phenomenon that enables us to “see,” ever so slightly, around the sides of objects, providing spatial depth and dimension. Stereoscopic views, or stereographs, consist of two nearly twin photographs — one for the left eye, one for the right. Viewing the side-by-side images though a special lens arrangement called a stereoscope helps our brains combine the two flat images and “see” the illusion of objects in spatial depth.

and

The Stereogranimator joins these latter-day adventures of the venerable GIF, mashing up an important early genre of internet folk art with a nearly forgotten species of folk photography.

You get to play with the creation of the gif, this creates a 2 frame animated gif and alternates between them.

Bonus link:Create 3D anaglyph images with 3 lines of Ruby code « saush

Update Colin maxwell tweeted Start 3D photos: 3D photo sharing and printing made easy