Keeping with the stereo theme, Jim Gasperini wrote up an idea so simple that is surprising how effective it is. To display stereoscopic images, he merely creates an animated gif with the left and right eye images. That’s it. While it doesn’t give a true 3-D effect, the resulting images do seem to give that feeling of depth.

Heck, the idea is so simple, I had to try it out. I dug around the web looking for stereo pairs, and came up with some nice public domain source material: pictures from the Spirit Lander. You can view the result on the right. Sure, they aren’t as cool as naked people in the surf, but it will demonstrate the idea. It would help if there was some left to right and right to left motion in the frame, and the degree of motion is somewhat large. I swiped a couple of pictures from Rob Crockett’s gallery and retried it with better results. I’ll try to get some more of my own examples up sometime soon.