Hello again! We were doing some spring cleaning and found a curious plastic lens contraption along with some instructions for using it hiding in a drawer. The instructions explained how to use the 'viewer' to look at the stereoscopic images (better known as 3-D) in the Stereo World Magazine! Orginally, I thought that Stereo World was a magazine about music or sound art, because people normally associate the word stereo with stereophonic sound. However, the word stereo actually has Greek origins relating to three-dimensionality.
So how does 3-D imaging work? It imitates our eyes! The average person's eyes project two slightly different images onto the retinas, which are then transformed in the brain into spatial representations. Using both eyes allow one to perceive spatial representations. But when we look at a regular image it is only "one-eyed" and therefore flat. When the lenses imitate a person's eyes, a pair of almost identical images are separated by the average distance between a person's eyes - the viewpoint becomes similar to the view seen by the left and right eye, thus creating a 3-D image! How cool is that? With 3-D movies, television, videogames, and art on the rise in popularity it is nice to know the basics of that technology.
Stereo World Magazine has been around since the 1970's and is quite a gem in our collection. It thoroughly keeps track of the past, present, and future of 3-D imaging. Feel free to come into the library to check out these fun magazines! We can even provide patrons with a handy-dandy pair of viewers.
-Library Assistant Rebecca Wilkinson
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