I’ve been a bit MIA at Camp Magic Macguffin for the past week as the family has been in San Diego having a wonderful time. Oddly enough, even on vacation with my family ds106 has not been far from my mind. Walking around Legoland I had many thoughts about assignments, both current ones and possibilities.

We took in Miniland, an area full of cities and creations made of Legos. It’s really quite impressive. I took a few pictures of this Lego steamboat with the purpose of creating a wiggle stereoscopy image. I ended up only using two of the images after trying to get one that worked the way I wanted.

I’m finding as I work through ds106 assignments (slowly, but still) that I don’t fully understand why I think things work or don’t work. Hopefully as I continue with this process I’ll hone my eye and begin, to a bit at least, to be able to explain my thinking.

I find these 3d wiggle stereoscopy animated gifs really fascinating, so I tried it.
I took a lot of pictures down at Lake MacGuffin this past weekend, so I found some shots that looked like they would work.
If you haven’t seen them before, here’s the basic idea. You take 2 shots of a subject from slightly different position or angle and then make them into an animated gif. If done right, you get a 3d-like effect.

If they’re not wigglin’, click on the image to get it going.

For the bird gif, I put the two images into separate layers in Gimp. I made one of them 50% opaque while I worked so I could see them both superimposed. Then I used the move tool, the scale tool and the rotate tool to try to get the main body of the bird matched up in both layers. Then I set the opacity  back to 100% and cropped the whole thing so that both layers were the same size and shape. I saved it as an animated gif and set the interval to about 150ms. I used the same general technique for the other one as well.

Here’s a few links with some more examples and explanations of the effect.

Jim Gasperini http://www.well.com/user/jimg/index.html
Wiggle stereoscopy – a new approach http://sunpig.com/martin/archives/2005/12/12/wiggle-stereoscopy-a-new-approach.html

That’s my story. Any Questions?