Remarkably, I still have film to develop from my 2024 trip to the arctic. For the work displayed on this page I used a paired set of Olympus XA-2 cameras:
Dissecting the wobblegifs
Wobble gifs are sometimes known as wiggle gifs, both loosely describe the back and forth switching of images in the short animation. Either way - these data sets are packaged in the form of the *.GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) file. GIF animation works by displaying a sequence of frames stored in a single file, creating frame-based playback. The format supports looping and customizable frame delays.
In the Olympus XA-2 Stereo rig shooting set-up there are only two frames, each is scanned and then programmed in Photoshop to have a short delay.
3D Wobble GIFs appear to have dimensionality by taking advantage of the phi phenomenon, motion parallax, and KDE Kinetic Depth Effect (KDE) to create an illusion of depth using alternating frames. The rapid back-and-forth shift between slightly different perspectives tricks the brain into perceiving the disparity as depth. Notably this method of viewing stereo pairs of images allows humans to perceive depth when viewing a 2D image of a 3D scene with one eye. Vishwanath, D., & Hibbard, P.B. (2013).
Lab notes: Nice work on these rolls. Your exposures are well balanced. Focus is sharp. Keep it up!!!
In regard to these images being stereo (assuming the pairs are supposed to be the same images,) they do go out of sync. Our scanning team double checked the negatives and both rolls have 27 frames with no gaps. On roll1 frame 9, this is missing from roll 2. No gap or blank frame. Also on roll 1 frame 20, the stairs are missing from roll2. Again, no gap or blank and the roll continues on. So those two frames are not present in the negatives and on Roll2 the very last 2 frames are not present at the end of roll1.
The difference in the final wobblegif frame-rate is noticeable. When I make these images, I often go back and forth with the rates to see which best suits which image. Generally the less disparity between images the shorter the frame duration can be.
If you strip each separate image out of the GIF they work as a stereoscopic pair of images.
This has led me to design a viewer for wobble gifs (above). The sketch above illustrates the concept.
There would be a screen based image for the left eye and one for the right eye, in stereo - flickering in an alternate pattern with the speed adjustable by a physical knob.
This set up would allow for a standard stereo view and the optional single flickering KDE image.
If the pairs swap the viewer would perceive a pseudo stereo image followed by a stereo image. Which may or may not be tolerable. If not, then the knob can simply be dialed backwards to show a regular stereo pair.
Gifs are useful just for short animations in webpages as well:
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