Lansey's Alternate Resume :: Drawing Magic Eye Stereograms in Matlab and MS Paint

Jonathan Lansey's Alternate Resume

Home

Publications

Magic Eyes and Me

I carefully constructed some stereographs by hand in MS Paint way back in 10th grade, and more recently wrote a program to make them for me in Matlab. See the long winded story below. See/ download the Matlab script here. Click pictures for the larger versions.

This should look like a 3D elevation map of Antarctica, it was made by the script from the grayscale picture below.

Penguins photo courtesy of Galen Frysinger, and Antarctica map from Jamey Jones.

This one is classic, it spells my name out, Lansey

The long-winded story

The story of Magic Eyes and me is best told with a timeline. When I was little I spent some time figuring out how we have depth perception. When I found stereoscopic photos in elementary school, I thought they were a great idea and I even drew some crude stereoscopic pairs by hand on graph paper. In 10th grade and with the help of some relatively simple stereograms in my brothers book from the "Magic Eye" © series, I was able to make a few by hand in MS Paint. (Should I say by mouse?) Rather painstaking, I was in the middle of making a 3D guitar "masterpiece" when then the headaches came on so I quit working on it. Some finished examples are at the bottom.

A cousin of mine is related one of the original magic eye programmers who made the books. He explained the algorithm to me but I had no idea how to implement it. Recently I've aquired some skill with Matlab and threw a program together to do the job on the plane back from California in August 2007.

Pre Matlab Days, Stereograms by Hand (Mouse?)

Crude letters should spells out my last name, "Lansey"

Before Photoshop. notice the height changes in steps.

I avoid the steps problem in this kind of picture by horizontal stretching.

If you've made it this far down the page, you may be interested to know this:

The distance between the eyepieces on some fancy Binoculars is considerably less than the distance between the big lenses out front (see diagram).

This exaggerates depth perception greatly. Pay attention next time you look through one of these contraptions.