The essential feature is that at important distances such as two metres, with offsets of 80, 81 or 82 points, there will be about a fortieth of a metre/yard between planes. There are about 39.5 inches to a metre, so we can see that a stereo image on the point standard cannot resolve to better than about an INCH at six feet.

Fortunately, it is possible to SIMULATE positions between the dots. Consider the next image.

Here the lines are not at forty-five degrees. The larger blocks on the right show the action.

When an image can "blend" slowly from one plane to the next, an effect known as "stereo in the round" can be achieved. However, this requires automation. That was the reasoning behind the creation of the MoveR program.

The technical term for this process is ANTI-ALIASING, which is a variant of INTERPOLATION.

The process begins by finding a suitable image of the subject and cleaning it up. The author has standardised on keeping the image for the right eye unchanged, and making a copy for the left eye in which pieces are moved right to bring them forward.

This leads at once to the realisation that something must replace those pieces that are moved right. For example, in a woodland scene a tree can be moved right to make it smaller and nearer - but one cannot leave the original in place unless one WANTS a small tree in front of a bigger similar tree.

There is a need to INVENT, therefore, those parts of the image that were not recorded. If a photo is said to be the RIGHT image, one has to invent what a camera WOULD HAVE SEEN if it had been two-and-a-quarter inches (62 to 64 mm) to the left.

Fortunately, with faces, the nose would be seen further to the right and the exposed area would simply be a wider expanse of the hidden cheek.

When working on the stereo reconstruction of a scene with humans and background, the people are best removed from the scene and reinserted after manipulation.

MoveR has a width restriction of 2048 pixels. However, this should be adequate for most purposes.

The first thing to do it to find a suitable image.

This image is then cleaned up, and a copy is kept for the right eye.

A certain amount of "cardboarding" exists in nature - for example, in photos of cardboard! So the tip of the nose and the edge of the ear must be shifted by a dot or two to create this effect. Also, the edges of the spectacles.

Thereafter, we want to stretch the image around a curved surface. So we take Wehner`s QUARTER.COM and a blank 256-shade GREYSCALE bitmap that is exactly 256 by 256 pixels in size (66614 bytes). This must be called 1.BMP. From the DOS prompt, we run QUARTER, and the program will take its inbuilt sine-table and create an image that has a sinusoidal rise in brightness vertically and horizontally.

By turning and pasting, we can turn this by means of image-manipulating software into a 512 by 512 pixel image.

This image in turn can be pulled and stretched until it represents the desired DEPTH of the image. It is a Z-AXIS specification. Without it, MoveR would not know how to manipulate the dots.

The manipulated shaded image is laid on top of a copy of the left-eye image. We have to bear in mind that WHITE means NEAR, and BLACK means FAR.

Then we adjust the brightness of the shaded area, bearing in mind that WHITE means AS NEAR AS POSSIBLE. So the correct distance for Wheatstone`s cheek would be about two thirds of 255, or 170. That is the desired shade of grey at this point..

We continue in this way until we have created a reasonable representation of the depth information:

We should now have a left-eye image that we CONVERT TO 16 MILLION (16,777,216) COLOURS and save as XY.BMP, as well as a 256-SHADE GREYSCALE Z.BMP.

These two files can be put into a directory C:/WEHNER/MOVER together with MOVER.COM.

One can now use WINDOWS to go to MOVER.COM and create a shortcut. This is done by right-clicking on MOVER.COM. When the shortcut is created, one can alter the icon to MOVEICON, MIDICON or BIGICON. It may be necessary to rename the icon - eg. to STEREO.ICO - if it clashes with other icons in the system.

There is just one thing left to do. You have to load Z.BMP, and go to the BOTTOM LEFT-HAND pixel. This has to be redefined as the MAXIMUM EXTENT of the right shift.

So, because Bill Gates used mathematicians rather than engineers to design the BMP format, the Y-axis has its ORIGIN (Y=0) at the bottom, and the bottom left pixel is the first one encountered in the file.

With XY.BMP (16 million colours) and the same-size Z.BMP (256 grays) together with MOVER.COM in the MOVER directory, you go to the icon and click.

If all goes well, a DOS window should appear, to deliver the messages from the MOVER program. It should say "DONE". You can go to the "X" - top right of the window - and close it. MOVER.BMP should have been made.

MoveR will not overwrite an existing MOVER.BMP, so previous work should be saved under a new name. Then MOVER.BMP can be erased.

It is good practice to use an EXCESSIVE parameter pixel - say, 64, whilst developing the image. It helps you to visualise the roundness of the picture. Then, for the final result, you change to a lower value such as 16. The picture below had a PARAMETER PIXEL of 16.

XY was the LEFT eye image. It has now been turned into MOVER.BMP. You paste the RIGHT eye image on the left, and MOVER.BMP to its right. If all is correct, you finish off - such as by colouring:

This image is suitable for cross-eyed viewing.

The picture was quickly made to test the system. There really ought to be a competition in stereoscopic circles to create the most lifelike resurrection of Sir Charles Wheatstone.

There appear to have been a few shoddy attempts at making an image for each eye prior to Wheatstone. However, his 1838 lecture showed what vast effort he put into the study of visual perception. This was the moment that launched the 3D craze onto an unsuspecting world. He is truly the father of 3D.

For the best results, it is possible to use MOVER to move LEFT as well as right. In this way, the burden of dot-shifting can be divided equally between each image using the same Z-axis file.

You take the RIGHT-eye image and create a MIRROR copy as XY.BMP. You also turn Z.BMP into a mirror-image of itself. The PARAMETER PIXEL will have to be copied from the extreme right to the left.

That parameter will, of course, be HALF of what it would have been with only one image shifted.

After using MoveR, you turn MOVER.BMP into its mirror image.

Here is what happens when the entire sinusoidal shade image, with PARAMETER 144, is used for both a left and a right shift: