Trivision

In the plushier Victorian parlors, the stereoscope had been a favorite gadget. Viewed through its wooden lorgnette-style holder, special, double photographs looked solidly three-dimensional, and entertained the young & old on dull Sunday afternoons. Last week the Navy announced that it was perfecting an improvement: a single photograph which appears three-dimensional without benefit of "viewer."

Objects looked at directly seem three-dimensional because each of the two human eyes sees a slightly different picture. The stereoscope, with its two pictures taken from different angles, copies this principle.

Six years ago the Navy picked up an idea which Inventor Douglas F. Winnek had been working on since 1932. Winnek uses a camera with a lens wider than the distance between the human eyes, and takes his pictures on a special film covered with tiny, transparent ridges. These act somewhat like lenses.

Light which reaches them through one edge of the camera lens makes a dot-&-dash picture on the sensitive emulsion behind the ridges. Light passing through the opposite edge of the lens makes a slightly different picture. When the negative is looked at with both human eyes, it seems to be three-dimensional. Each eye, being in a slightly different position in relation to the lenslike ridges, sees a different picture. The two pictures, combining, give the appearance of depth.

The "trivision" negatives (as the Navy calls them) are reversed, the foreground appearing to be the background. But printed on special "trivision paper" they are startlingly lifelike. The process is not yet ready for demonstration. But Inventor Winnek and the Navy hope to adapt it to colored lithography and to movies, so that human beings on paper or screen will be almost warm with life.

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