Collection distractions #2: Stereoscopic photos at the IWM

Well today's collection distraction* is a number of stereoscopic photographs, mainly from the First World War**. These are pairs of images shot with a single camera and intended to be viewed with something akin to binoculars to get a 3D effect, and we have a few hundred (I reckon), around 150 digitised. I was prompted by seeing one and the very next day seeing a tweet about the New York Public Library's brilliant Stereogranimator, which takes the images and merges them into either an animated GIF or an anaglyph - those pictures where you need an old-fashioned pair of 3D glasses with one red and one blue lens. You get to make them with a tool they offer, and you can either use one of NYPL's own (pairs of) images, or upload from Flickr. Nice app, even if the results can be variable.
So here is one of our images and its "stereogranimated" version:

4th Australian Brigade Pierrots at the 15th Australian Brigade Sports at Bois de Mai, Cardonnette, near Amiens, 8 June 1918.© IWM (Q 8180)

GIF made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator

Quite a few of our images seem to have come from this sports-day, but that's not really why stereoscopic images were popular at the time. Here's an illustration of their military use:

German stereoscopic camera fitted with periscope for trench use on the Western Front. © IWM (Q 23938)

I don't know if such an apparatus was responsible for this view of the devastation at Verdun in 1916, (no animated GIF I'm afraid) but if you take a look at the zoomable version the scale of destruction is horrifying. The third dimension could surely have helped to tease out some understanding of this confusion.
Here's another battlefield use, albeit not more memorial than practical:


Battle of the Soissonnais. Prisoners taken by the 34th Division on the morning of 29th July 1918 when they captured Hill 158. © IWM (Q 8190)



GIF made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator

Go and take a look at the whole lot.

* yeah of course I had to come up with some sort of tagline for this supposed series of posts. This is subject to change. But it does reflect the fact that I am distracted far too often from what I should probably be doing by something amazing in our collections.
** I'm going to try to be a good boy and use this phrase instead of "World War I" like the rest of the world. I'm on-message, me.