3D-o-Mat is a simple app that creates the type of 3D photos that you view with red/cyan glasses.

I have been writing apps that do this for a while. It was one of the first things I wrote with DotImage back when I joined Atalasoft in 2006 and ported their image processing commands to WPF. Then, I wrote a simple version for iOS that I showed to middle-schoolers when I was a volunteer for DIGITS.

I was recently invited to speak at a Smith College Python programming summer program for HS girls and I decided to make this app more real.

PS: here’s a tweet sized version of the app in Python that I shared with the class the last time I spoke:

from PIL import Image as I
L=I.open(‘leftEye.jpg’).convert(‘L’)
R=I.open(‘rightEye.jpg’).convert(‘L’)
I.merge(‘RGB’,[R,L,L]).save(‘3d.jpg’)

— Lou Franco (@loufranco) July 17, 2015

This gist shows a better way to do it that preserves the color in the original photos.