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Ground Control to Space Cadet

Authored by: masodo on Wednesday, December 03 2014 @ 11:16 am UTC

The best way I know of to illustrate what is going on when freeviewing is to offer the following animation:

The Effect

This shows two images - The Gray block represents the left side of the stereo pair and the white block represents the right side image of the pair.

When properly "freeviewing" you will actually see the very effect depicted above. When you do it right you will end up with three representations of the the image in your mind's eye; the left image pushed out to the left the right image pushed out to the right and in the center will be a combination image made from the merging of both. The central image is what your brain uses to reconstruct the depth information.

What is happening is: when you relax your gaze so that your eyeballs are looking perfectly straight ahead - since the images in the stereo pair are spaced the same as your eyeballs - you end up with the left image directly in front of the left eye (with the right image in periphery) and the right image directly in front of the right eye (with the left image in periphery.) Your brain is then perfectly happy to interpret the view as 3D as long as you are willing to disregard the superfluous peripheral images (hence the blurring effect shown in the animation.)

If you can get the image below to mimic the above animation (r e l a x ... y o u r ... g a z e) you are well on your way to freeviewing 3D. Once you get the hang of "parallel" viewing you will need to convince your brain that it is okay to focus closer (because all your life whenever your eyes have been called upon to view in perfect parallel (and everyone's eyes do this), they have had to set focus on infinity.)

Practice makes perfect.