Autostereogram - History

History

In 1838, the British scientist Charles Wheatstone published an explanation of stereopsis (binocular depth perception) arising from differences in the horizontal positions of images in the two eyes. He supported his explanation by showing pictures with such horizontal differences, stereograms, separately to the left and right eyes through a stereoscope he invented based on mirrors. When people looked at these flat, two-dimensional pictures, they experienced the illusion of three-dimensional depth.

Between 1849 and 1850, David Brewster, a Scottish scientist, improved the Wheatstone stereoscope by using lenses instead of mirrors, thus reducing the size of the device.

Brewster also discovered the "wallpaper effect". He noticed that staring at repeated patterns in wallpapers could trick the brain into matching pairs of them as coming from the same virtual object on a virtual plane behind the walls. This is the basis of wallpaper-style "autostereograms" (also known as single-image stereograms).

In 1939 Boris Kompaneysky published the first random dot stereogram containing an image of the face of Venus, intended to be viewed with a device.

In 1959, Bela Julesz, a vision scientist, psychologist and MacArthur Fellow, invented the random dot stereogram while working at Bell Laboratories on recognizing camouflaged objects from aerial pictures taken by spy planes. At the time, many vision scientists still thought that depth perception occurred in the eye itself, whereas now it is known to be a complex neurological process. Julesz used a computer to create a stereo pair of random-dot images which, when viewed under a stereoscope, caused the brain to see 3D shapes. This proved that depth perception is a neurological process.

Japanese designer Masayuki Ito, following Julesz, created a single image stereogram in 1970 and Swiss painter Alfons Schilling created a handmade single-image stereogram in 1974, after creating more than one viewer and meeting with Julesz. Having experience with stereo imaging in holography, lenticular photography, and vectography, he developed a random-dot method based on closely spaced vertical lines in parallax.

In 1979, Christopher Tyler of Smith-Kettlewell Institute, a student of Julesz and a visual psychophysicist, combined the theories behind single-image wallpaper stereograms and random-dot stereograms (the work of Julesz and Schilling) to create the first black-and-white "random-dot autostereogram" (also known as single-image random-dot stereogram) with the assistance of computer programmer Maureen Clarke using Apple II and BASIC. This type of autostereogram allows a person to see 3D shapes from a single 2D image without the aid of optical equipment. In 1991 computer programmer Tom Baccei and artist Cheri Smith created the first color random-dot autostereograms, later marketed as Magic Eye.