Amazing. Genuine (but shaky) old 3-D images on the web

by David Safier

Here's a image taken with a stereo camera in 1905, which, through the magic of gif animation, is rendered in a shaky 3-D.

GIF made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator

It's on the NY Library Stereogranimator site, with lots of others.

For those not familiar with this old 3-D technnique: Photographers would take two images of the same scene from angles about the distance between your two eyes. They were printed side-by-side, then you viewed them through a device that only let you see each with one eye. It's like the Viewmaster, if you remember those.

Here, they've taken the two images and animated them, so you go back and forth so quickly, you get the sense of seeing them with separate eyes. This isn't a fake. It's a genuine 3-D image. You can read more explanation and see more examples on the site.