A fun new toy from the folks at NYPL....
I did a search for "Brooklyn" and "New York", and found many fascinating old images, including one that was taken very close to where I live now, taken in the late 1800's....
From the NYPL website:
"If you look through enough old photographs, you might notice that many from before 1900 come in seemingly-identical pairs. What you may not realize is that these pairs were meant to be viewed together, each side lending the other a sense of depth that a photograph alone cannot possess. Stereoscopic photography recreates the illusion of depth by utilizing the binocularity of human vision. Because our two eyes are set apart, each eye sees the world from a slightly different angle. Our brains combine these two different eye-images into one. Stereoscopic views, or stereographs, consist of two nearly twin photographs -- one for the left eye, one for the right. Viewing the side-by-side images though a special lens arrangement called a stereoscope helps our brains combine the two flat images and "see" the illusion of objects in spatial depth.
Using stereoscopes, the entertainment-seeking public of the 19th century immersed themselves in these 3D photographs in a manner akin to how we now view movies, video games or cellphone screens."
