3D Photography - Can new tech make it more accessible?

I haven’t forgotten about this topic and have been looking into a few things. Here is the solution I came up with that is comparable to viewing old stereo pairs with an Underwood hand held unit, which I have used to make the comparison. I’m now using an Owl VR designed by Brian May (member of the band Queen), here is a web page to see what it looks like - (https://www.berezin.com/3d/owl_vr.htm) I was able to download a bunch of stereo pairs from the Library of Congress (https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/stereo/) in jpg or tiff and put them on my iPhone SE and an old iPad Air. Viewing on the phone was OK but the horizontal screen is just a bit narrow (4.2 inches) and, while I could get good stereo effect and no pixilation, I did start to get eye strain after a few minutes of viewing. Then I tried the iPad and it worked much better because the image is almost 6 inches wide and the original card is only 7, so it’s pretty close.

Here is my procedure. I transfer the photos from my desktop to the iPad, I used an app called Any Trans. I then moved all the photos (40 of them) to their own folder. Turn the iPad vertically and lock the screen, this automatically keeps the images at the right size . Open the Photos app on your device and the folder you made for your 3D images. On my old iPad Air (from 2013, using iOS 12.5.5) when I open the folder I see thumbnails of all the photos. In the upper right hand corner is “Slideshow”, tap on that. The first slide should come up and the background will go black so you don’t have a bright screen looking back at you. Touch the screen once and it will stop with an “Options” button in the lower right corner, tap that. I set the “Theme” to Dissolve (it gives a neat effect in 3D), select your music or turn it off, I left “Repeat” off and set the speed about 2/3 toward the rabbit but this can be adjusted later on of course. Tap the screen again and the menu disappears, tap the triangle at the bottom of the page and the program will start. Tap again and the program will pause. I thinks it is so neat that you can have a folder of 3D photos and it will play on it’s own, which makes the whole process of viewing easier. I checked the iPhone and I can get it to work also, but the actual procedure is a little different.

What I need to do now is find a way to secure the Own VR viewer to the iPad so I don’t have to hold it in place the entire time. Right now I’m using two 3 1/2x1/4” rubber bands (one across the top and one on the bottom) and it works well enough for now. Once in place I could hold the iPad with one hand and use the touch screen below the viewer to swipe the images forward or back which made navigation much easier. The resolution of my iPad is OK (those old stereo photographs were not that sharp anyway), but the view would be much better on a newer device, and new digital stereo’s from a good camera would be great. Also, I did try viewing the images on the iPad horizontally and there was some size changes that made some of them large enough that it was impossible to align with your eyes. If you edited the images you could get them as big as a normal stereo pair, but with what I had, it would be a lot of work, but it can be done.

Sorry this is so long but I hope it helps.