Viewing Rift screenshots by crossing your eyes (hint: don't)

"drash" wrote:
The difference between Rift screenshots/videos, and 3D images that could be viewed by crossing one's eyes was something that I didn't really quite pick up on for a while, and I can see that this is a very common misconception, so I thought I'd try to make it clear with some examples.

I ended up making a quick page for this since I can't seem to get the whole images to show up in a forum post. Here it is: http://crunchywood.com/tos/

Hope this is useful!

I have no problem at all viewing your images on my 27-inch 2560x1440 main monitor. Just look "through" the screen at the 3D image behind it. But I have been doing this for over 50 years, so it has become easy for me. If an image pair is too large to do this comfortably, just reduce its size (ctrl-mousewheel).

When I first began free-viewing 3D images, cross-eye viewing was much simpler. When I publish 3D images, I like to provide triplets (R-L-R) so that the viewer can use either cross-eye or wide-eye viewing, at his discretion, but this is not a choice for Rift images.

This is a skill that gets MUCH easier with practice, and comes in useful more often that you would expect (such as for solving the "find six things different between these two picture" puzzles that can be solved instantly by rotating them 90-degrees and doing a stereoscopic merge on them. I also do that to visually compare two similar object that I hold in my hands. Like I said, very useful skill to practice, so I would change that "hint" to "do".
;)

"geekmaster" wrote:
When I first began free-viewing 3D images, cross-eye viewing was much simpler. When I publish 3D images, I like to provide triplets (R-L-R) so that the viewer can use either cross-eye or wide-eye viewing, at his discretion, but this is not a choice for Rift images.

Triplets. Mind blown.

"geekmaster" wrote:
This is a skill that gets MUCH easier with practice, and comes in useful more often that you would expect (such as for solving the "find six things different between these two picture" puzzles that can be solved instantly by rotating them 90-degrees and doing a stereoscopic merge on them. I also do that to visually compare two similar object that I hold in my hands. Like I said, very useful skill to practice, so I would change that "hint" to "do".
;)

Mind blown again! Great pro-tips, thank you! :) Changed the thread title to be more appropriate.

I posted in the other thread just now, but I am pretty sure I am wide-eyeing it. Worth noting that if you do it for a while it creates quite a lot of eye-strain - it is probably not good for one's eyes.

"guysherman" wrote:
I posted in the other thread just now, but I am pretty sure I am wide-eyeing it. Worth noting that if you do it for a while it creates quite a lot of eye-strain - it is probably not good for one's eyes.

Eye-strain only if the image centers are too far apart. You can either reduce the image size, or crop off more of their inner edge, to prevent eye divergence. Although I can free-view wide-eye Rift images on a 7-inch display (I have had a lot of practice), it is not comfortable (eye-strain). I cannot comfortably view normal SBS images on a 7-inch display though. Just shrink them before viewing to prevent eyestrain.

I was talking to a friend who was working on a 3D gif for his art blog about this: http://kendallnelsonart.blogspot.com/2013/07/sequoia-national-park-in-stunning-3d.html

It seems there are two schools of thought for whether you should display L-R or R-L on screen (parallel or cross-eyed, respectively). We hadn't thought about L-R-L. I personally can't do cross-eyed viewing because my vision blurs when I do. However, I'm a pro at looking past it because I grew up as a fan of the Magic Eye book series. They displayed it as L-R.

We know that there are disparities in preference, but are there any statistics on popularity? I see both everywhere. Is there any hope for standardization?

"MikeAlger" wrote:
We know that there are disparities in preference, but are there any statistics on popularity? I see both everywhere. Is there any hope for standardization?

Man, we drove through that tree depicted in the cartoon at your link when I was a kid back in the 60's...

I prefer L-R-L or R-L-R, so no need to download cut and paste the photo for my viewing preference.

There are 3D gallery sites that recommend that for their content too:

"http://cszone88.appspot.com/phereo.com/

And the MTBS3D site has a 3D gallery, with its own viewer applet:
http://www.mtbs3d.com/gallery/index.php

But for general 3D image posting? Yeah, L-R-L or R-L-R for sure... :D

Man, I'm getting old...

I first learned of cross-eye viewing from an article in the magazine linked below (beginning on Page 56).

I can do it now with no effort or eyestrain.

http://archive.org/details/starlog_magazine-041

I didn't get how to free-view for a while, but it finally clicked after trying many times. Cross-eye is much easier for me, but I can do parallel as well. However for parallel I will have to have the image in a small window. For cross-eye I can do full-screen. No problem looking at Rift images in the forum, or on YouTube (non-fullscreen).

"cybereality" wrote:
I didn't get how to free-view for a while, but it finally clicked after trying many times. Cross-eye is much easier for me, but I can do parallel as well. However for parallel I will have to have the image in a small window. For cross-eye I can do full-screen. No problem looking at Rift images in the forum, or on YouTube (non-fullscreen).

I believe that, unless your a lizard, parallel is going to be limited to images that are not much further apart than your ipd. Cross eye doesn't have that limitation.

I can't cross eye anything larger than 5-6 inches on my screen. Doesn't matter what order the images are in. When the images are too large, I just cannot get them to converge.