Mar 30, 2022·edited Mar 30, 2022Liked by David Friedman
Hello,
In case you weren't aware of it, the DOS game 'Magic Carpet' from 1994 had a stereograph mode. It was great and unlike anything I've seen before or since. I remember playing it with tears pouring down my cheeks from concentrating so hard on seeing what was going on. Here's a picture.
Hi! I wanted to leave a --brief-- message here to serve as a sort of "I was here" mark, and also to express appreciation for these interesting articles!
I had started my evening catching up on my Discord notifications, which led me to investigate a Cardano NFT project (blockchain stuff) involving stereograms. I was given one of those Magic Eye books as a present when I was a kid (I'm 27 at the time of writing this), and while I haven't thought of stereograms much since then, the remembrance of that book is what made that project catch my eye.
Anyway, that was 5.5 hours ago, and I've been falling down a "research pit" of sorts since then. One of my stops was here after stumbling upon Scott Pakin's stereogram experiments I found when looking into stereogram history. I was trying to google more information about him and a link to this article came up, and I'm glad it did! Reading some of the other posts here gave me a nice respite from the stereogram stuff I was obsessing over for the previous part of the evening.
Thank you for writing such neat pieces and taking the time to post them! I subbed to your newsletter, but I get so many emails these days I only look at them when I'm expecting something time sensitive or needing a response.
It's always fascinating to me how I discover certain information. Who would have thought I'd end my night reading about Doris Diether among other things?
Awesome post! I absolutely love the transparency one.
I’ve seen a lot of these pictures made for fun, but very few made for practical purposes. This is a huge mistake! Stereographic images can significantly enhance the interpretability of 3D data by leveraging human binocular vision. There is some usage of these techniques by NASA on their rovers and in structural biology, but as far as I know zero penetration into other fields.
So I wanted to share a tool I wrote to make stereograms/anaglyphs/wigglegrams out of plots of scientific data. It's a free open-source add-on to the popular matplotlib plotting library, check it out here! https://github.com/scottshambaugh/mpl_stereo
I also first noticed this effect as a child. In those days we had phones on the wall, and for our kitchen phone we had an extra long handset cord. If you remember, these were curly so they stretched. When my mother was on the phone and the cord was pulled across the room to where she stood at the sink, I used to stare at the cord until the curls overlapped and then it would appear to me to be much closer/larger. It frightened me a little, like I entered a different reality.
When I saw stereograms for the first time I wished I had pursued my curiosity about the concept when I had initially discovered it.
I love this stuff, thanks for this article, the musical sheet blew me away! Have you seen these ultra-deep stereograms? There aren't many of those and I'm not sure how it works, but hey, it's pretty cool, look at this: https://www.reddit.com/r/MagicEye/comments/p67996/deep_space_combination_hidden_image_object_array/
Hello,
In case you weren't aware of it, the DOS game 'Magic Carpet' from 1994 had a stereograph mode. It was great and unlike anything I've seen before or since. I remember playing it with tears pouring down my cheeks from concentrating so hard on seeing what was going on. Here's a picture.
https://mobile.twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status/732994865408188420
Hi! I wanted to leave a --brief-- message here to serve as a sort of "I was here" mark, and also to express appreciation for these interesting articles!
I had started my evening catching up on my Discord notifications, which led me to investigate a Cardano NFT project (blockchain stuff) involving stereograms. I was given one of those Magic Eye books as a present when I was a kid (I'm 27 at the time of writing this), and while I haven't thought of stereograms much since then, the remembrance of that book is what made that project catch my eye.
Anyway, that was 5.5 hours ago, and I've been falling down a "research pit" of sorts since then. One of my stops was here after stumbling upon Scott Pakin's stereogram experiments I found when looking into stereogram history. I was trying to google more information about him and a link to this article came up, and I'm glad it did! Reading some of the other posts here gave me a nice respite from the stereogram stuff I was obsessing over for the previous part of the evening.
Thank you for writing such neat pieces and taking the time to post them! I subbed to your newsletter, but I get so many emails these days I only look at them when I'm expecting something time sensitive or needing a response.
It's always fascinating to me how I discover certain information. Who would have thought I'd end my night reading about Doris Diether among other things?
Awesome post! I absolutely love the transparency one.
I’ve seen a lot of these pictures made for fun, but very few made for practical purposes. This is a huge mistake! Stereographic images can significantly enhance the interpretability of 3D data by leveraging human binocular vision. There is some usage of these techniques by NASA on their rovers and in structural biology, but as far as I know zero penetration into other fields.
So I wanted to share a tool I wrote to make stereograms/anaglyphs/wigglegrams out of plots of scientific data. It's a free open-source add-on to the popular matplotlib plotting library, check it out here! https://github.com/scottshambaugh/mpl_stereo
Is there anyway to get ahold of Scott Pakin? Email (only see a .org)?
I also first noticed this effect as a child. In those days we had phones on the wall, and for our kitchen phone we had an extra long handset cord. If you remember, these were curly so they stretched. When my mother was on the phone and the cord was pulled across the room to where she stood at the sink, I used to stare at the cord until the curls overlapped and then it would appear to me to be much closer/larger. It frightened me a little, like I entered a different reality.
When I saw stereograms for the first time I wished I had pursued my curiosity about the concept when I had initially discovered it.
Interesting I saw the one where the colors were supposed to vanish but they did not vanish for me. But the hidden image was clear.