Stereography and Autostereograms

by Peter Chang


Abstract

A short article on autostereograms with a perspectively correct method of generation.

Preface

Copyright ©1994, 1995 by Peter Chang. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to reproduce and distribute this document in whole or in part, subject to the following conditions:

Introduction

Throughout pedestrian high streets, poster shops and book shops, up and down the country --- not just in one country but sweeping all over the world --- people are standing around staring at what, at first sight, looks like images of modern art. They come in several varieties: random dots in black and white or in assorted colours; seemingly repetitive splotches of colour; and tiled patterns. But they are not works by Jackson Pollock aspirants.

They are a relatively new type of stereogram, and proliferate in various forms from postcards to books and albums to posters. Even some advertisers use them as eye-catching novelties or gimmicks. They come in many names (Holusion, Stare-E-O grams, SIRDS, etc) but are generically know as single-image stereograms or autostereograms.


Table of Contents

  1. Survey of Stereography
  2. SIRDS and SIS
  3. Example code
  4. History of xpgs & Bibliography

Back to the information page.
Postscript (52639) and ASCII (15596) versions are now available.
They are GNU zipped -- if you don't have this then get it (!) otherwise I can send you a copy by email in most popular archiver formats (uuencoded, of course). Hmm, for those without gzip here's the vanilla postscript file (148518).

Comments and criticism are most welcome.

10th May 1995 - Updated my email address and corrected some tabs in sample code.

6th March 1995 - Thanks to Xiao Wei (xw at pip.fpms.ac.be) for pointing out that equation (2) was wrong.

14th October 1994

Peter Chang: Peter.Chang at nottingham.ac.uk