Over the last year or so, we’ve been doing some experiments with spatial images. A spatial image is a single image file, but has a different picture for your left and right eye. These are commonly used in Virtual Reality, but we’re all probably much more familiar with them from the old View Master toys.
The View Master was a plastic set of goggles that you inserted a paper disc into that would rotate around to see a set of seven 3D images! It appeared in 3D because the images for the left and right eye were different images of the same thing using slightly offset cameras. This mimicked what you’re left and right eye would naturally see.
100 years before the View Master, we had Stereoscopes. The earliest was from 01832 and worked in exactly the same way, but instead of a paper disc, they used single cards with printed images. They were the first 3D VR headsets.
Luckily for us, there was a crazy for taking these 3D pictures, which means you can find lots of 3D imagery from 100+ years ago online. Reykjavik and Iceland both have online photography collections. With a little bit of searching and help from their team, we found thousands of stereoscopic images in the archives. These consisted of a single, wide image that contained both the image for the left and right eye.
- Stereoscope images on Sarpur Iceland’s Cultural-Historical Database Website
- Stereoscope images on Reykjavik Photography museum website
Converting to Spatial Images
There are lots of tools out there to make spatial, but they assume that you already have two separate left and right images. Usually this is done with either two separate cameras, or two lenses on a single camera and they get processed as two images.
What we had was a single image that had both pictures side-by-side. To convert this into two separate image files, we opened some image editing software, duplicated the image to two layers, and arranged the left and right images to be on top of each other. Then we could crop correctly and make any minor adjustments.
Now that we had a left and right image from the stereoscopic card, we can run it through software to create a single 3D image file. We use Spatialify, it is cheap, easy and works! It offers several “3D” output options, the traditional blue/red offset (anaglyph) for the blue/red 3D glasses, wigglegrams which are animated gifs, and proper spatial files viewable in VR.
There is a lot of trial and error getting things right. Sometimes the source images are badly scratched, damaged or rotated. Finding the correct alignment can be difficult and sometimes the subject matter just doesn’t lend itself very well in 3D. Luckily, we have a thousands of possible images to convert, if something isn’t working we can move on.
Gallery
Here is a short list of zip archives with the left, right, spatial, anaglyph and wigglegram for the image. Be aware, these images might still be under copyright.
Magnús Ólafsson (1862-1937)
01906, A group of people washing clothes in Laugardalur.
Download: MAÓ 106 – 6.1 MB
Magnús Ólafsson (1862-1937)
01931, Austurvöllur, Reykjavík. Bertel Thorvaldssen statue prepared for transport.
Download: MAÓ 429 – 6.8 MB
Magnús Ólafsson (1862-1937)
01900-01920, Old hut in Hafnarfjörður lava field.
Download: MAÓ 429 – 7.1 MB
Magnús Ólafsson (1862-1937)
01930 or 01931, German Graf Zeppelin over Reykjavík. Grófin 1, Tryggvagata and Reykjavík Harbour.
Download: MAÓ 429 – 6.5 MB