Eponymously Yours, W. Skeffington Higgins

A feature briefly introduced by Google Books on April Fool's Day has returned: one can request that book pages be displayed in 3-D.

Here's a fine example.

If you are the sort of person who keeps red-cyan anaglyphic glasses around, you will observe that Google gives a gentle curve to the pages, like a real book lying on a table.

I wish Joan Eslinger had lived to see this. As a stereophotography buff, she would have been tickled.

As Google's 29 June announcement explains, to view a book in 3-D, incorporate the parameter "&edge=3d" into your book URL. (If there is an octothorpe (#) in the URL, this parameter must be placed somewhere to the left of the octothorpe.)

You're welcome.

I was thinking about 3-D movies today. Suddenly I recalled that I had seen a batch of photos in the Google Life archive that included one of the most famous of all Life's pictures: patrons in a movie theatre wearing 3-D glasses.

It was shot by the appropriately-named J. R. Eyerman (1906-1985), at the Paramount Theater in Hollywood on 26 November 1952, during a showing of Bwana Devil.

Since there were multiple pictures from the shoot in the collection, I began to wonder whether one could find two of them, shot from slightly different points of vew, that might permit the construction of a 3-D image of the audience itself. Wouldn't that be cool?

Unfortunately, it turned out that there aren't very many images. Some of them are duplicate images printed at different exposures. And Eyerman apparently used a tripod, so the camera doesn't move much with respect to the audience.

Nevertheless, I found a couple of images that allowed me to animate the audience. Here's a quick-and-dirty GIF. It's copyrighted, as always, by Time, Incorporated.


One could do this trick with many of the Life shoots. If one needed a new hobby for some reason.