The entire process was ridiculously easy. All you have to do is get the two images the right angle apart as would be seen by your eyes from the distance the camera is from the specimen; for a camera two feet above the specimen on a tripod, this is about six degrees. I literally just taped two pencils to the underside of a clipboard with scotch tape at the right distance to make a angle of six degrees if I pushed down on one end of the clipboard, put the braincase on the clipboard under the camera, and started taking pictures; for each stereopair, I took the first photo with the clipboard level, then pushed down on the end with my finger to tilt the specimen for the second picture. I assembled the entire figure below in about a day, and can get the images to pop out right on the screen just by crossing my eyes.
If you have ever been able to get those "Magic Eye" pictures to work (or not), the principle is the same; just let your eyes relax so that each image for each stereopair splits in two, and get the splits from each photo to cross over each other. It helps to identify particular landmarks on each photo and concentrate on getting them to cross over. Just WILL them to do so, and eventually your eyes will figure out what they are supposed to do.
The main disadvantage with stereopairs is a size restriction. Equivalent landmarks can't be more than about 60-65 mm (the distance between your eyes) ON THE PAGE (or screen), so the stereopairs can't be more than about twice the size they are on the screen now. This is an obvious disadvantage if you want to show details on something big like a braincase, so I will probably end up just using stereopairs for particular details like the middle and inner ear. Still, it was pretty cool to be able to assemble something like this so quickly and easily.
Followup: Mike Taylor at SV-POW has a post showing a couple other methods of presenting stereopairs which are pretty cool.
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Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week has a follow-up article, ... but red-cyan anaglyphs are cooler. Looks like Paleo Errata doesn't handle trackbacks, hence this manual note.
Its important to note that even if you can't get Magic Eye things to work, this is no impediment to stereopairs. There seem to be alot of people out there who have the mistaken impression that you should be able to get stereopairs to work with the naked eye. Although some of us can do this, you are actually supposed to used binocular stereopair viewers. These are fairly inexpensive and easy to use.
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