When you use this hands-on exhibit…you’ll look at special two dimensional (2D) photos through coloured filters, so they look like they’re three dimensional (3D).
This technique is commonly used for 3D effects in movies and recent video games, but how does it work?
The pictures in this exhibit may look as through they have been misprinted, but they are really anaglyphs.
Anaglyphs have two ‘snapshots’ of the same picture from slightly different angles and in different colours.
Printing the pictures so they overlap mimics the view you have from your left and right eyes in your skull.
You can check how different each eye’s view is normally by looking at something in front of you and opening and closing each eye.
You’ll probably notice that things seem to ‘shift’ in position. This small difference between each eye’s view is called disparity.
Each anaglyph picture is printed in different colours (such as one red and one cyan/blue), so when you view an anaglyph through coloured glasses, each eye sees a slightly different picture.
When you look at these 2-D anaglyphs through the red filter, the red parts look white, and the green parts appear black.
Through the green filter, the green parts appear white and the red parts look black.
Your brain blends together the image it receives from each eye, and interprets the differences as being the result of stereovision.