A Holmes viewer, a box of Keystone cards, two old 3D cameras, a 3D printer and an iPhone. Old technology meets new technology.
Drag to set how far the two views sit apart — it moves every image pair on this page. Red/cyan glasses optional.
Coming soon to the App Store
Your MPO photos on iPhone and iPad, straight from the camera. No conversion step, no computer.
Two frames next to each other, the way a stereo card is printed. Free-view it or drop the phone into a viewer.
MPOViewer reads the MPO files your camera already writes — the stereoscopic format used by the Fujifilm FinePix W1 and W3, among others — and shows both frames the way you want to see them.
Shoot, open, look. The archive that used to live on a memory card or behind a desktop converter now travels in your pocket.
In review — App Store release soonAbout
A viewer, a box of cards, and one idea too many.
In 2021 I picked up a Holmes stereoviewer and a box of Keystone and Underwood stereographs. Looking through it felt like travelling back in time, in real 3D. It was stunning. I went hunting for an old camera so I could shoot stereographs myself, found a Revere 33, and later a Revere 22 viewer, which I cleaned up and fitted with a working bulb.
The collection kept growing. Then I came across the Library of Congress stereograph collection, and an idea took hold: what if I could view those scans on my iPhone, straight through the old Holmes viewer? All I needed was a holder. My Original Prusa Mini had been sitting idle for months, so I started designing, and the iPhone 13 Pro Max holder came out of it. The viewer got heavy after a while, so a tripod mount followed. Now I can sit at the kitchen table and watch hundred-year-old stereographs.
While reading up on stereography I found out that Fujifilm once built a digital 3D camera, so I tracked down a good one on eBay. Suddenly I could shoot 3D myself — but the photos could only be viewed on the camera. The one converter I found ran on Windows, and I work on a Mac. Time to put my development skills to use: a command-line tool that reads both frames from an MPO file, stitches them together and writes out the result. That became version 1.0 of MPOSplitter. I kept adding options, released it — and eventually the same itch turned into MPOViewer for iOS.
Software
Turns an MPO file into a side-by-side JPEG you can actually look at. On the desktop, from the command line.
The Fujifilm FinePix Real 3D writes MPO files. One MPO holds two JPEGs — one for the left eye, one for the right. To view them through an old stereoviewer, the two frames have to become a single side-by-side image.
3D printing
Two printed parts that turn a phone and a 130-year-old viewer into one instrument.
You can view side-by-side images straight from your phone: lay it in landscape on the right spot of the stereoviewer and look. Holding both up for long stretches gets tiring, so the holder and the viewer sit on a tripod instead.
Where to find images
The Library of Congress has thousands of them, and they fit your viewer.
The iPhone app LOC Collections searches the archive. Type stereo followed by your subject, open a result, drop the phone into your viewer setup and look.
Search stereo Netherlands and you get a list of historic Dutch stereographs, ready to view in 3D.
Get LOC CollectionsGallery
Hover a card to pull the two views further apart.
Links
Everything mentioned on this page, in one place.