Viewing 3D

There are number of options for viewing side-by-side 3D images like the ones in this blog. The easiest is with some sort of viewer. The London Stereoscopic Company sells the OWL viewer for £15 + P&P. Designed by keen stereo enthusiast Brian May, this inexpensive viewer can be placed over a phone's screen, making this the simplest entry to stereoscopy. Just click on one of the photos in the blog to see it full-screen on your phone.

The next easiest method is with a VR headset that uses a phone as its screen. The discontinued google cardboard project was ideal for this. Funnily enough the View-Master brand was briefly revived during the last big push for VR and its VR handset (it's not designed to be strapped to the head) is a pretty decent cardboard viewer (perhaps confusingly it's made of plastic.) It's so discontinued that the apps it replies on are no longer available in the Google Play Store, but it works well enough with a phone showing the image full-screen. This is more of a faff than the OWL viewer as you have to open and close it to change images. However they can be picked up cheaply on eBay.

The cheapest way is to free-view them. Some people find this easier than others as it involves getting each eye to see the left and right images individually. This is something similar to those magic eye pictures from the '90s, although I find it easier than those, which I still often fail to see. There are two forms of free-viewing: parallel and cross. In parallel viewing you view the left image with your left eye and the right with your right. This is how the photos in this blog are presented as it is also compatible with the viewing devices discussed above. In cross viewing, you kind of go cross-eyed and for this the images must be swapped so left is right and vice-versa. As previously stated, the photos in this blog are presented for parallel viewing only.

There are other ways of viewing these photos in 3D, but they require expensive and sometimes hard-to-source equipment such as 3D TVs and displays or projectors. If you're already in that arena you probably didn't need to read this article.