How Does Stereoscopic 3D Photography Work?
Stereoscopic 3-D photography has been around almost as long as photography itself. In the 1830s Sir Charles Wheatstone theorized that we see the world in three dimensions because our eyes are set about 2.5 inches apart, and see from two slightly different viewpoints. You can test this by holding your thumb at arms length. Close one eye and look at your thumb, then look with just the other eye, and you will see that there is a deviation, or parallax, between what your eyes see. Your brain fuses these two views together, interpreting the amounts of parallax as depth. This is called binocular stereopsis. Wheatstone figured out that two cameras could be placed side-by-side and take simultaneous pictures, creating a pair of photographs from both left eye and right eye perspectives. When viewed through a stereoscope, the left eye only sees the left image, the right eye only sees the right image, and we perceive a single 3-D view. The author’s 3D photos from Comic-Con Throughout the late 19th
