I’ve been fascinated by 3D every since I was a kid. I can still remember being mesmerized & enthralled by the television ads for Creature From The Black Lagoon in 3D – a midnite movie in the early 80′s when I was 7 or so.

Growing up, there wasn’t much in the way of 3D entertainment & so it should come as little surprise that, with the advent of the Internet, I began hoarding 3D images and videos. I learned not only to take my own homenbrew 3D pictures & videos, but experimented with methods of converting existing 2D videos & pictures into 3D as well.

Among my collection are thousands upon thousands of vintage stereo images from all over the world during, taken during the last century and a half. I’d been intending to convert them into red & blue anaglyphs for my own viewing (I’ve got a few pairs of 3D glasses floating around), but have instead begun converting them into “wiggle 3D”, which can be viewed online without extra eyewear.

“Wiggle 3D” works by rapidly switching back & forth between the left & right views from the original stereoscopic pair of images. The resulting animation produces the illusion of depth. The really neat thing is that, even people who normally lack depth perception will be able to appreciate the 3D effect since it’s being “forced” into a single view.

As you can tell, the rapid switching does cause the images to be “twitchy”, to say the least. I take no responsibility for any nausea or seizures caused by repeated viewing…

That said, I’ll be posting more of these up as time allows & will be featuring specific sets frequently. I’ve already picked out several fantastic images from the 1884 World’s Fair, some wonderful Native American images, pictures from the great 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, a few from the American Civil War, some great historical images from Oregon, New York, Florida, and tons of others.

If you have any stereo pairs you’d like to donate to my collection, feel free to send them along! You can email them to krougeau@gmail.com