First attempt at trying to create wiggle stereogram by compositing fore, mid and background of original picture. Frames 1 and 3 are the "original", frames 2 and 4 have the fore and background shifted left and right relative to liberty trying to convey some parallax.

Hasn't worked anywhere near as well as examples of this technique I've seen on the net but might be worth playing with, maybe extra layers of depth, mathematically correct parallax shifts (I just picked a few pixels left and right arbitrarily), other distortions to simulate the shot being taken from two angles and better subject matter (we're not used to seeing mountains behind Liberty)?

Some good (and not so good) examples of what I'm trying to achieve here (really like the 2nd one, which was artificially generated - I hope!):

http://www.squidoo.com/3d-animated-gif

Original images borrowed just for education purposes from:
http://powerlisting.wikia.com/wiki/Mountain_Adaptation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Statue_of_Liberty,_NY.jpg

I like it. Shame you can't see it in 3D when it's still. A great effect though.

Yeah, totally relies on the motion to trick our brains into picking up on the cues and "seeing" depth. Should work for those who are "depth blind" too.

This is a pretty lame attempt, I encourage you to go find better examples on the net, there's a real WOW if you find a good one.

I love the psychedelic dimensions one on squidoo.

LOL I hadn't scrolled down that far! But yeah that's a good one and obviously rendered and a nice example for me to learn from - I can see a few other things going on apart from the left/right shift.

The 3D renderers on here might like to try some thing similar, you just need to render one of your creations with the camera slightly shifted to represent the gap between our eyes and pop the results on to separate animation frames. I'm thinking this might also work with the camera zooming in and out a little too - any takers?

Can't guarantee good results, but - hell- why not.

Haven't tried zoom yet but here's my first attempt.

Good results Eris.

Excellent step7 and Erisian! Both do have such an amazing 3D look! And I didn't get dizzy or disoriented from looking at them.

I was thinking that with Erisians image... if the "wiggling" was less distance left/right but more quick jittering... then it could have an earthquake effect while maintaining the 3D effect. And the earthquake effect would be more of a realistic landscape event. Too bad high wind effect with the clouds and tree/grasslands wouldn't work.

LOL good job Erisan! Nice work of isolating the foreground, how long did it take to pick out all those "holes" in the tree foliage? The wiggle could be a bit quicker for my tastes but I suppose wigglying 8 frames any quicker could start to CPU hog. Hope you had fun playing with this idea, I found it quite labour intensive (and confusing for me with just 4 frames!) - desperately needs some scripting

Note sure if I was right about using zoom to give a depth effect, could be interesting though (or at least nauseating) - I think they call it a "dolly zoom" in the movie business (think Hitchcock:Vertigo).

@Barbie: I was going to try some motion blur to if it helps the effect. Fogging distant objects was another idea. As you can see getting the amount of wiggle and timing right is the trick here - haven't quite nailed it but having a think now about the maths involved (and making my brain hurt in the process).

Molly - thank you

Barbie - Nice idea. I might give it a go.

Step7 - The holes were difficult and I had to "paint" them in with the eraser tool. Good job I'm used to painting! Copy visible together with paste as new layer makes lighter work of animations. I had 3 working layers plus the copied layers. Just deleted the working frames at the end.

Tried an earthquake but although it looked good in Gimp, after exporting to GIF it played slow again.

Let's see if this is any better.

LOL "Quake", does look like the estate at the back are having a spot of bother. The 3d effect of the 1st layer vs the midground isn't bad though. I'm still intrigued by the tree - it's got a 3D thing going on by itself even though there's no wiggle within it - is that where you've painted on it?

It might be partly due to the soft brush I used but it's probably more an optical illusion triggered by the overall 3D feel. The estate at the back is where I live so I'm glad it ain't real!!! ( I'm right at the bottom of the hill. )

Well - thought I'd go for another.

Very cool effect!!

Nice one - which part of the country is this? Again some more monster isolation work on the tree! I would just run away at the sight of something that perforated - I think I need to go find some tuts on isolating "difficult" objects.

This is Swindon, Wiltshire, England. The tree this time was perforated using a layer mask with an inverted duplicate in it. Threshold was then run on the layer mask and after applying the layer mask I darkened it to remove light edges and to make it fit the rest of the scene.

I've tried the threshold technique - with desaturate first - maybe that's the problem? I've had cases where there is insufficient contrast(?) between what I'm trying to isolate and the background for the threshold to work properly. I'm going to try a colour correction/shift on the image before desat next time I do it - see if that helps. I'm very much a noob at all this, tricky isolations still fill me with dread! I know I need to read up, work through the tuts and practice.

Yeah, you've got to get the right image really. I only chose the part of the tree that was against the sky which made it a lot easier.