From Neil Doherty
I was intrigued from the outset with autostereograms (AS), that is, once I had mastered the awkward art of actually seeing an AS (see “How to play tricks with dots”, 9 October 1993).
I notice that you can see round them to a degree and from varying angles as with real 3D. So I would like to suggest an experiment for those with suitable equipment to carry it out.
If they were to create a few seconds worth of “cartoon” AS footage of progressive motion from an original starting point and back to it – for example, two balls in mutual orbit around each other – this could be played back on a monitor (which I know will reproduce an AS because I’ve tested it with my video camera) for sufficient time to adjust our eyes to see the effect.
The point of the test, of course, is to see if motive AS footage can be reproduced for future 3D television. The point of success would be that we could look towards 3D viewing with present-day technology, a vastly superior alternative to creating perhaps unnecessary new technology to do the same job, and instantly accessible to all.
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Assuming that, given success, computers can intermingle two-shot images from real life in the manner of AS presence, we’d see a jumble of moving lines and no images until we settled our eyes (brains) to viewing properly, but practice would probably make viewing such TV almost as easy as viewing is today, and it’s a lot more comfortable than wearing a pair of coloured specs.
