Free browser tool · nothing to install

Type a word, draw a shape, or drop in a photo, and Stereogram Studio turns it into a hidden-picture stereogram: the kind of noisy poster that suddenly pops into 3D when you relax your eyes. It can also make red/cyan 3D-glasses images that look like plain static without the glasses.

Open Stereogram Studio

How a Magic Eye works

Each eye sees the world from a slightly different spot, about 6 cm apart, and your brain turns the difference into depth. A stereogram exploits that with a pattern that repeats across the picture. When you point your eyes past the page, each eye lands on a different copy of the pattern, and your brain fuses the two copies into one surface floating behind the paper.

The hidden shape is made by nudging the repeats. Where the copies are a little closer together, your eyes have to converge a little more to line them up, so that part of the surface looks nearer. Draw the nudges in the shape of a word, and the word stands out of the background, even though no single copy of the pattern contains it.

Getting that right without smears and ghost edges is fiddlier than it sounds. The tool uses the method Harold Thimbleby, Stuart Inglis and Ian Witten published in 1994, which works out which pairs of pixels each eye must see as the same point and links them together. I added a couple of fixes on top so random-dot pictures don’t streak around the edges of shapes.

What you can make

• Text: type a word or a short message. This is the classic “hidden word” poster.
• Drawings: paint on the depth map with a soft brush. Brighter means nearer, so you can sculpt hills and holes.
• Photos: an AI model estimates how far away everything in your photo is, and that depth becomes the hidden shape. A pet or a face works well.
• Patterns: black-and-white dots, colour dots, smooth colour noise, or your own picture tiled across the image.
• Red/cyan anaglyphs: a pair of random-dot images printed in red and cyan. Without glasses it’s just static; with cheap 3D glasses the shape appears. The tool checks that nothing shows without glasses, which makes it handy for puzzles and secret messages.

It runs entirely in your browser

There’s no account, no upload and no server doing the work. The page is a set of plain files; your own computer does every calculation. The AI depth step downloads a small open-source model, Depth Anything V2, the first time you use it, then runs it on your graphics card or processor. Your photo never leaves your machine.

Tips for seeing it

1. Hold the screen or page close to your face, so it’s blurry, then slowly move it away while keeping your eyes relaxed, as if staring into the distance.
2. Watch the two guide dots at the top. When they become three, hold your gaze there and the picture will lock in.
3. If you can only do the cross-eyed method, switch Viewing to Cross-eyed.
4. Give it a minute. Some people get it straight away; others take a few tries. Once you’ve seen one, it gets much easier.

Printing, and big screens

There are presets for Letter paper in portrait and landscape, at print resolution. The one setting that really matters is Dot spacing, the distance between the guide dots. Your eyes can only fuse copies closer together than your eyes are, so the tool sets the spacing in real centimetres on the page or screen, not in pixels. Around 3 cm is comfortable. That’s also why a Magic Eye blown up on a projector stops working unless you shrink the repeat to match.

Make one now

Want to see the red/cyan side taken further? Channel Thirteen is a short ghost story told entirely in 3D static.