NEW PICTURE BOOK

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIV, Issue 196, 2 August 1934, Page 3

NEW PICTURE BOOK

, Realistic Effect Given Both Mary’s little lamb and the big, bad wolf have found a new way of making friends with boys and! girls (says a writer in America.) They have got a new kind of picture book printed about them which shows animals and birds much more the way they really look in actual life. The pictures are three-dimensional, which means that as you look at them it seems just as though you were looking back into the depths of the scene instead of just as something flat without any depth. It is something like looking into the oldfashioned stereoscope on grandmother’s parlour table. As a matter of fact, it is really like looking at a diorama in a museum, where the birds and animals have been placed in the kind of scenes they actually live in. Here the visitor to the museum stand's in front of a big glass case, sometimes as high as the ceiling, and the animals and birds stand out in relief before him just like the actors and actresses on a stage. With these new books boys and girls can see the animals and birds almost as well as going to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, because the pictures have been made from the big glass eases right in the museum itself. As the man said who makes the books, its ‘‘almost like taking the museum into the home or the classroom. ’ ’ To use these books of birds and animals properly it is necessary to look at the pictures through a pair of eyeglasses which seem a little bit at first because one eye is blue and tbe other is red. But right here is the secret. The different coloured' lenses are what make the pictures look the way they do. Without the glasses, or the scope, as the blasses are called, the pictures seem awfully confusing and blurred. • But Mr Montrose Newman, who makes these books with the help of tbe Chicago Field Museum, said that it had tto be done like this. The way he does it is to take two pictures of the same view from two different angles just like it would be seen by anyone's two eyes. These two pictures are then coloured, one red and the other blue, and one is printed on top of the other. This accounts for the blurred effect to the naked eye, but when the picture is viewed through the scope it all becomes clear, because your red eye picks out the red part of the picture and' your blue ye picks out the blue part, and the two individual views blend together with the effect of one outline standing out in relief against the other, thus causing the illusion of depth.