My stereogram program

Samples I created

Background

Back in the mid 1990's, I was one of those who hung out at the mall, standing and staring at each of those "stereogram" posters, trying to see the 3D image captured in each.

"How on earth did they do that?! How does it work?" I was intrigued and took notes, measured the distance between the dots, sketched little diagrams with eyeballs and visual targets, drew patterns... trying to figure it out! Sketches like this helped me understand some key principles and understand what needed to happen at the scale of the printed dot:

Then I wrote a program that generated some 3D images in black and white. In 1999, I rewrote it in Java and added features that let me choose the wallpaper background and choose the shape to put in the foreground, etc.

The program

The Wallpaper tab enables you to choose the image that is to be repeated to form the background of the stereogram.

The Depth Instructions tab enables you to select an image that contains information about what is to be in the foreground and what is to be further back (white is closest, black is furthest).

The Stereogram tab enables you to specify just how deep the 3D image is and how large to make the final image.