Looking for some afternoon entertainment? Over at the New York Public Labs, you can build your own 3D or moving image–turning 19th Century Stereograns into fun digital images.
After Maria Popova at Brainpickings introduced the new tool, this GalleyCat editor made a rushing waterfall GIF and a 3D waterfall (embedded on the right).
Oliver Wendell Holmes explained the tool back in 1859: “We have now obtained the doubleeyed or twin pictures, or Stereograph, if we may coin a name. But the pictures are two, and we want to slide them into each other, so to speak, as in natural vision, that we may see them as one. How shall we make one picture out of two, the corresponding parts of which are separated by a distance of two or three inches?”