Mars Wiggles

August 20, 2012 7:38 AM

Mars Wiggles
Stereoscopic wiggle GIFs from Mars Rover imagery.

Ever since I saw these [NSFW] stereoscopic GIFs from '02 I've been interested in the concept and art of GIF wiggling. I gave the Spirit and Opportunity rovers a try back in '04 and am giving it another go with Curiosity, but now on Tumblr. Images are picked from MSL's raw images gallery as they come in, usually Navcam and Hazcam pics. (The Mastcam lenses are different focal lengths, so I can only get wiggly with Mastcam pics if the rover mast moves enough to create parallax effects.) GIFs are made in Adobe Photoshop/ImageReady 6. (Don't judge me. It suffices.)

Role: Wiggler

posted by brownpau (4 comments total)

This project was posted to MetaFilter by circular on August 21, 2012: Mars Wiggles

Ha!
posted by cortex at 4:29 PM on August 20, 2012

Neat!
posted by smcameron at 9:54 PM on August 20, 2012

Love it, thanks.
posted by circular at 12:02 AM on August 21, 2012

Thanks to everyone for all your feedback here and in the Mars Wiggles thread on the Blue posted by circular.

To address some of the complaints about headachiness and general crappiness of wiggle-age, I've started refining my GIF-creation technique through (1) cropping for optimum parallax, and (2) quick-dissolve transitions between frames to smooth out the sense of motion.

This means narrower fields of view in which to wiggle a scene -- for example here and here -- but with a much less jarring jump between left/right perspectives, especially on Navcam shots where the lenses are much farther apart.

I'm especially grateful to those of you with amblyopia or other one-eyed vision conditions for your feedback in this; I was thinking specifically of your conditions in making these GIFs.
posted by brownpau at 4:11 PM on August 24, 2012