Stereoscopic Ambiguity in Overlapping Areas of Ambiguous Stereo-Images

Posted on by Mad Shifty

I realize this title of this post sounds rather redundant but bear with me for a moment. I’m working right now with my friend Don Froula on volumetric visualizations of Lissajous figures and he took it up on himself to make the Stereoscopic SBS video below of the patterns he created on his oscillator, because that’s the stand up type of awesome guy he is 👍👍👍

It’s MUCH appreciated as I don’t have an oscillator or the technical training to know how to use one, let alone generate patterns from an illustration in a book 🙂

Don took it up on himself to reproduce the SBS stereoscopic image pair in this book after seeing my recent post about it on Instagram and sparked a wildfire of investigations 👀

Since his oscillator experiments only provided lateral movement, he was able to make the stereo video above rather easily by duplicating and doubling up the single video shot of his oscilloscope screen in a video editor and stepped a third of a second apart to create the 3D video above.

These forms are ambiguous, they can be viewed as Cross OR Parallel views and the pseudo and ortho views should essentially be viewable in both manners.

You might view a three dimensional stereoscopic form of the figures, they might rotate in one direction or the other and you may be viewing it pseudoscopically or orthoscopically. You may encounter many different perceptible variations even when watching the same portion of the video over again in one moment or another. This is because they are AMBIGUOUS FIGURES and your perception of what you see is a truly personal experience.

What most people, SHOULD encounter across the board- and mind you I am saying SHOULD, this is an educated guess and I am looking forward to actually attempting to realistically measure results- what I believe will happen is that no matter what you are seeing, when the lines cross over each other, it will simply just get all jumbled up at that moment… I think this is a rather interesting phenomenon and Don has already found a very solid reference about this very phenomenon and I will try to find additional research to investigate as well for the upcoming article we are working on… it DID remind me of an experiment that I did myself, which although is not the same, it seemed similar enough and I did it using tools and techniques that I was comfortable with and I created the video below.

This is one of the videos I made for the 2021 NSA 3D CON 3D theatre presentation (I think, it was whichever one Eric Kurland runs) where recognizable outlines of figures filled in with a solid color, become ambiguous at different depths when “laid one on top of another” so to speak.

I don’t really have much to compare and contrast this on as of yet, we just started exploring this seriously over this past weekend, but I do believe there is something there that these two videos share. I just wanted to share it with my reader community before moving forward because everyone’s perception in these cases may very well be different from one person to another, but the perceptual “interruptions” that crossing or overlapping of ambiguous  patterns or visual elements, seems to be a more universally experienced phenomenon. I think there’s something to that and I hope between Don, myself and anyone else who cares to chip in- even just by mentioning WHAT YOU SEE- that we can arrive at a place of deeper understanding or at least find a path that might lead us to it.

I hope you at least enjoy these stereo videos at the surface level for what they’re worth 🙂 Please feel free to hit me up on my social accounts or via email if you like, I’m very interested in hearing about what you see 🙂

Thanks for reading!

–ilicia