What is Stereopix?

Stereopix is a sharing platform for stereophotographers where they can publicly show their stereophotographs and discuss them. The photographs are dynamically transformed into various formats suitable for different kinds of viewing methods or display technologies.

It is run by JackDesBwa and is not backed by any company. Authors keep their rights on the photographs and are responsible for all the content they publish on the platform. The platform is self-sustained by the donations of its visitors and publishers.

What is a stereophotograph?

A stereoscopic photograph (or stereophotograph, or stereophoto...) is an image composed of two slightly different views specially crafted to create the illusion of relief when exposed to each corresponding eye. They are also called 3D photographs because you can truly sense the depth. This is really amazing!

The trick is based on stereopsis, a visual and neuronal mechanism that creates depth from two separated points of view, such as the ones seen by our eyes. The characteristic tiny differences between the views (real or photographed) allow us to rebuild a complete 3D representation of the world. Our brain is fantastic.

A variety of devices use different principles to guide each view to the appropriate eye, and of course, the stereophotograph has to be presented in the format adapted to the one used. Some trained people are even able to view side-by-side representation without any device (ocular gymnastics required). This website converts the shared photographs in different formats so that each visitor can choose their preferred way of viewing the images.

If you did not know about stereoscopic photographs before, a lot of amateur's and clubs' websites explain different techniques to view (and take) them. Learn and come back to enjoy photographs shared on this platform, and perhaps publish your own ones.

How to get best Stereopix experience?

You can have access to the content with any browser, however some provide better experience.

Basically, these are the some main (easily fulfilled) recommendations:

• Graphical browser
• Webp image support
• Javascript enabled
• WebGL support

The first one is quite obvious: as the main content is made of images, a graphical browser (as opposed to text-only ones) which can display them directly is more suitable for enjoyable exploration.

The image format is primary webp, which offers good compression with low quality loss, and is now supported by most up-to-date browsers (see compatibility chart). A jpeg fallback is provided in case of absence of support, but the quality and definition of the images are slightly reduced and this part is less tested.

The stereophotograph viewer uses javascript to transform source images into various viewing formats. Thus, you need to allow script execution to get the best of Stereopix. In case of disablement, a fallback side-by-side image is displayed and some features are disabled. In addition, if your browser supports WebGL technology, a more featured viewer is displayed.

In short, please use modern browser to get the best of Stereopix.

What are categories?

To explore the hosted images, Stereopix provides special albums named categories.

Highlights category is automatically filled with stereophotographs recently highlighted by the community.

Fresh category is automatically filled with newly published stereophotographs.

Random category is automatically filled with random stereophotographs and the list is renewed randomly.

For connected users, Followed category regroups the photos of the stereographers you follow and Favorites lists the images marked as favorite.

Other categories are filled by the community, either by the authors of the photographs or other members who took time to classify them manually.

The categories are:

Legal and miscellaneous mentions

Data and server are located in Europe, hosted by Contabo GmbH.

The service is run by JackDesBwa, but the content is added by users who are reponsible for what they publish.

There is no commercial cookies. The only cookies used are the ones necessary to run the website: used to keep the sessions active and to remember viewer preferences from one visit to another.

You can write to the webmaster at this address: contact@stereopix.net