Stereogram #1

Do you remember when Magic Eye pictures were all the rage? There might be an image of apparently random dots or perhaps repeating wallpaper, but if you could get your eyes to point beyond the image while focusing on the printed page, all sorts of bizarre 3D images might suddenly appear? Or perhaps you would just get a headache. Me too.

But sometimes it would work, especially if I didn't have to squint too much. And I quickly discovered that you didn't have to obscure the original image (in fact, some stereographs date back more than a century). Take two pictures from slightly different vantage points, then print them side by side. With a special viewer, the pictures could be superimposed in three dimensions. Or you could just squint.

Since digital photography was still ridiculously expensive in its infancy, I used my state-of-the-art computer (an Amiga 500 running Sculpt-Animate 4D) to generate a brilliantly imaginative animation of the space station Deep Space Nine rotating in space. In 3D. Just before the Star Trek people released a holographic keyring of the same thing, grrr!

Sadly, all my work was lost when I ditched the Amiga and bought this PC, and anyway the formats were incompatible, sigh. But now that everyone has a digital camera, it's dead easy to do. You only need two images, taken from a few centimetres to a few feet apart, depending on the distance. I've done three above, because that works too.

Put them in a paint program, crop them, line them up and Robert is your mother's brother.

Now I just need to find a decent subject.