Notes and History of xpgs

I first came across SIRDS in the spring of 1991 when a friend's friend in the computer department showed us them. Though I couldn't see them then, I wrote some simple programs in C using the GKS graphics library from the outline code given to me.

My interest in SIRDS was rewaken by a friend, Gareth Richards, who found some on the net and printed them out in May 1993. From there, we took it upon ourselves to write a SIRDS program using proper 3D datasets in C with Xlib graphics.

By 15th July 1993, we released a free and simple SIRDS animation package called "xps". Soon after getting hold of the Thimbleby paper, we modified our program to implement his algorithms and released "xpgs," version 1.5 (the change of name was due to the existence of another free X package with the same name) on 26th October 1993.

Gareth also reworked the code to work on a PC and called the subsequent program "SIRDSAni". This is a shareware package, available from Platonic Software.

Both these programs and this article can be obtained from us. If you have net access and a WWW client then have a look at the pages given by the URL http://www.ccc.nottingham.ac.uk/~etzpc/sirds.html. I can be contacted by email at Peter.Chang at nottingham.ac.uk.

Some SISes produced with xpgs

De Milo? - grey-scale SIS (362238)

Space - colour SIS (52207)

Mandel Sinc - grey-scale SIS (324663)

Solar System - colour SIS (118515)

Bibliography

"Stereogram"

published in the UK by Boxtree Ltd with ISBN 0 7522 0924 8. Copyright ©1994 by Cadence Books, USA.

"Displaying 3D Images: Algorithms for Single Image Random Dot Stereograms"

H.W. Thimbleby, S. Inglis & I.H. Witten, Department of Computer Science preprint at University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ. To be published in IEEE Computer and can be found at ftp://ftp.cs.waikato.ac.nz/pub/SIRDS.

"How to play tricks with dots"

H.W. Thimbleby & C. Neesham, New Scientist 140 #1894, 26 (9 October 1993).

"Stereogram FAQ"

compiled by S. Inglis. It can be found at the URL http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~singlis/sirds.html. Stuart Inglis can be contacted by email, send your messages to singlis at cs.waikato.ac.nz. The "Stereogram-FAQ" is a list of frequently asked questions (with answers) that are asked in the USENET newsgroup alt.3d.