3D-tizing Photos

Make any photo 3D using GIMP.

This example shows how small the lateral distortion on photos need to be 
in order to achieve a 3D effect.

Examples for parallel viewing and cross eyed viewing are shown below.

The open source Gimp application contains a filter called iWarp.
This filter can distort photos in many funny ways.
A jpeg file containing two identical photos can be found below.
After loading them into GIMP, the following should be the result. 

Only the move mode will be used.
The deform radius and amount will be varying.
It is not a bad idea to resize the Iwarp window to view the preview better.

When one views 3D in the parallel mode,
moving images in the two picture towards each other will make them appear closer.

For this example, moving background images by around 1mm away from each other
appears to cause the hair to stand out.
The preview window can display the results in real time.

If one prefers the cross eye method,
then the movement needs to be done in the opposite direction.
 

Ideally one would want to move the head in both pictures as whole units
towards each other.

But the movement tool appears to be done perhaps like an air brush.
Movements as small as 1mm really stand out. 

To add depth within a face, a smaller radius is needed. 

This example has only added 3D details to things like the nose and mustache. 

This example mainly shows that the magnitude of lateral distortion needed
to 3D-tize a photo appears to be pretty small.

It would not be hard to write some software to do this
using a modifiable standard face template.

The movement of the pixels can best be displayed on a grid.
The movement of the pixels within a midrange radius are as such.

Here is an attempt to do a Lincoln Photo.

Doing 3D details around the eyes would require some small and precise movement.
Something like a mesh map plugin might be needed.