New York Public Library's Stereogranimator!

[Newt_on_Swings]

Wow as a person who has played with and marveled at stereo pairs and just spending hours sitting with a viewer and a stack of cards sliding them closer and further out, this new project by the NYPL is just amazing. I had always wished someone would do this, now its a reality!

The New York Public Library has scanned and digitized their stereographs and allows users to make animated gifs, and 3d anaglyphs with their simple and straight forward in browser tool.

This is quite a rare opportunity to see some amazing photographs from their collections, and a bit easier with an animated gif to see them work, as using the hand held sterogram viewer device you need to get it just right for your eyes to "see" it. You can view the images created by others, or you can try to improve their's, or start making your own.

main site:
http://stereo.nypl.org/

Popular gallery (great examples):
http://stereo.nypl.org/gallery/popular/1

Project details:
http://stereo.nypl.org/about

Many were taken from "United States in Stereo: In the Robert N. Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views" 40,000+ Steroscopic views.
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=all&col_id=361

I hope you werent working on anything important, and this might take over your next few hours

 

[EASmithV]

I'm not sure I understand the purpose of the jumpy-gifs.

 

[holmburgers]

The "jitter" gifs let you view the stereo effect w/o any kind of special viewer. It jumps back and forth between the 2 frames so you can experience the parallax difference.

 

[Newt_on_Swings]

Yes if the jittery.jumpy gifs are aligned correctly the stereoscopic effect can be really pronounced, and I think personally more comfortable to view than with glasses on.

Sometimes the people making these dont line them up well, but you can edit it and make your own and line them up correctly to get the effect right. Some of them are very "3D" which I think is based on subject distance from camera. Objects in the close to intermediate distance are quite pronounced, scenery and land scape less so.

 

[holmburgers]

Very true, though there are instances when they'd shoot things in hyperstereo, which is any base length wider than our interocular distance. Put the lenses far enough apart and you could make thunderheads look like whipped cream.