A Friendly Guide to Stereoscopic Images and Videos
Jul 4, 2025
How Our Eyes Create Depth
Your left and right eyes stare from slightly different spots, so each one captures a unique view. The brain merges those two views and infers distance from the tiny differences between them, a cue called binocular disparity. Stereoscopic images and movies copy that trick by sending a dedicated picture to each eye, letting cliffs jut toward you and snowflakes drift past your nose.
Popular Stereoscopic Formats
Side by Side (SBS)
Two frames sit next to each other. A headset shows the left frame to the left eye and the right frame to the right eye, so each eye sees only its own viewpoint.
Over Under (Top Bottom)
The stereo pair is stacked vertically. Playback software stretches each half to full height before delivering the proper view to each eye.
Anaglyph
Both views are blended into a single image with red and cyan tints. Cheap filtered glasses block the “wrong” color for each eye, separating the pair.
Interlaced or Polarised
A special screen encodes alternate lines or polarisation angles. Matching glasses make sure every other line (or every other polarisation) reaches the intended eye.
Spatial Video
Apple and Meta introduced a container that stores separate left-eye and right-eye video streams plus depth metadata, ready for devices such as Vision Pro and Meta Quest.
Capturing Depth
Classic rigs mount two lenses roughly 65 mm apart—about the distance between human eyes. Dual-lens phones and depth cameras record disparity data directly, while modern AI can infer an extra viewpoint from a single frame, letting you breathe depth into old flat photos or videos.
Editing and Delivering Stereo Media
Align and crop so key subjects sit at comfortable depths.
Set convergence—the imaginary screen plane—so objects neither poke out too far nor recede uncomfortably.
Encode to a target-friendly format such as SBS MP4 for YouTube VR or Spatial Video (MV-HEVC) for Vision Pro.
Test on real hardware. Tiny parallax errors that look fine on a monitor can feel huge inside a headset.
Spatial Media Toolkit: Turn Flat Memories into 3D
Spatial Media Toolkit (SMT) removes much of the friction that usually comes with stereo production:
Private, offline conversion. Its AI runs directly on your device, so nothing is uploaded to the cloud
Works on Vision Pro, Mac, iPhone and iPad, with batch conversion everywhere
Built-in spatial editor. Trim, reorder, add music and preview inside Vision Pro before exporting
Modernises old VR footage. SBS or top-bottom videos are remapped into formats that Apple and Meta headsets play natively
Loved by users. More than 500 Vision Pro App Store ratings average 4.8 stars
Ready to give your favorite clips real depth? Download Spatial Media Toolkit, convert a 2D video to 3D, and step back into the moment—this time in full immersive space.
