ILLUSION — Optical Illusions

How to view 3D photo. Guide in Pictures

Normal reading or viewing (NO 3D)

Cross-viewing or The Cross-Eyed Method

Parallel-viewing or The Parallel Method

Stereo photo or convergent stereopairs

If you can put an eye in a pile, then you can move right to stereoscopic pictures observation. If you don’t then we recommend you to learn the technique of 3D-photos watching at first. If you want to go on with stereo images, then welcome to our gallery of stereoscopic illusions.

Stereophotography is a picture of some objects on paper or screen that gives understanding about their location toward the observer and each other. Plane photo can’t describe the distance between objects. All the pattern combined filming of pre-computer age is based on this space.

Sergey Elizarov

Sergey Elizarov was born in Moscow in 1967. He’s got a wife and a little daughter. Finished 2 institutes and worked as a pastry chef and a coffee-machine exploitation engineer. Now he is a free kid photographer. He works professionally at stereophotography and shared some of his works with us specially for our web-site. Every picture is a convergent pair, where there are separate images for both eyes. Lots of people can’t learn to watch these pictures, but we hope you can.

Just a picture is not enough for us, stereo-photographers. Our cameras see the world with two eyes. We capture events in 3D.

Let’s have a little lesson to learn how to watch convergent stereopairs.

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How to watch stereograms

- Well, there it is, I can see it! So big and with large ears, just like the real one!

- But there’s nothing there!

- Try once more. Look through it, just as there’s nothing before you…

- I’ve been looking at this for half-an-hour. I can’t do it. I see only these palms and birds!

- Don’t look at the birds, put your nose on it. No, like this… Stick it to your forehead…

- Now I don’t see anything at all.

- You don’t need to. Don’t look at the picture… Yeah, that’s it. And now slowly put it away… Not so fast! Slooowly… And don’t focus at the picture, it doesn’t exist, don’t look at it, c’mon!

- Oh, there is something, but it’s muddy and blurry…

- Keep on moving the picture but don’t focus at it and this thing will reveal itself… And? Tell me, how is it!

- Wow! I can see it! Awesome! It’s a sheep! Cool!..

- Are you out of your mind?! It’s an elephant! Don’t you see the trunk?

It happened so that I had learned about stereograms before I saw them. My namesake told me at university that there was a picture in a paper which had no definite image but his aunt could see Jesus in it. Then I thought “Oh yeah, why didn’t she see space aliens there?” Much later someone brought a stereogram album to our dormitory, where I could see the hidden image after a long effort. In some years I saw Jesus at one stereogram. Today I am greatly surprised that still there are people thinking that stereos are the mass liars’ conspiracy or just our imagination.

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Unique 3D photos from the past.

We offer you a little plunge into history and see the old photos in the new 3D format.

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Stereograms recommended for people who many working at the computer

To see a hidden 3D image, you need to focus the mind on an imaginary point of the image (see pic.). If you have no experience of considering stereograms, it can be quite difficult. True, some people seem to have a certain predisposition to defocusing and they do it very soon. If you do not belong to such people, then you will need patience, patience and again patience. Many believe that if they did not see anything interesting in the stereogram, looking at it a minute or two, they are think that the nature did not give any chances  to them. It is not. With sufficient perseverance success is guaranteed.

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