I've been trying to come up with a way to do a 3d painting. basically I've realized that a magnifying lens doesn't just make things appear larger in the x and y plane but it also makes things appear larger in the z axis. In other words the scale increases the further you get away from the lens. your eyes will perceive greater depth also. Objects only a foot away from a Fresnel lens appear to be an infinite distance away. You can easily prove this to yourself by opening each eye separately and you will see objects in the distance move an eye width each time you do this. A point an infinite distance away will be perceived by each eye as being directly in front of that particular eye. So I have a way to make objects appear further away. The only trouble is that this works best if there is air between the image and the lens. If there is air though while it will make the artwork lighter it will also make it more fragile. I guess it's not that big a deal. As for making things pop out of the image I suppose that's not so important since it's unlikely that anything pops out of an image. I mean it's pretty cheesy in a movie when things come out directly at the viewer. It's similar to what is known as an aside like in Faris Bueller's day off when he kept talking to the camera. It was cool in that movie because it was like he was one step ahead of everyone. Rather than using his intelligence to be nerdy he used it to be cool and popular. He was so smart in fact that he even knew that he was in a movie and that people were watching him. Maybe it was more of a one up manship sort of thing. The guy who gets away with everything. Anyway when it happens in most films (the actor talking to the audience) it reminds you that you are just watching a movie or watching a play. It removes that immersive experience for a while. It's the same with that comin at ya effect in a lot of 3d movies because the viewer feels like the effect is addressing him personally. In dreams certain experiences will sometimes remind the dreamer that he is in a dream and he will thus quickly wake up. So I guess it's not that important for objects to pop out of the scene. I was hoping that a concave lens could create that pop out effect. I know a fish tank brings far things closer but it shrinks things in the z direction. When light leaves the fish tank the wavefronts become more circular again. They are circular when they get to the edge but the spherical wavefronts are the radius from the glass to the fish but when the wave-front leaves the radius shrinks again because not all of the sphere has left the tank. Only a portion of that sphere has left the tank. It makes the spherical wave-front smaller
A convex lens can both make things appear further away and it can also make things appear to pop out of the lens. The trouble is that it only works when a thing is sufficiently far away fro the lens. A foot away from the lens an object appears infinit distance. If you move it a little further it becomes blurry. If you move it still further it becomes clear again and it appears to pop out of the lens. You almost have to want to see this popping out effect because while it pops out it's also much smaller in size. It's only the paralax that tells you it's popping out and though its easier to see than some kinds of 3d it still takes a moment to realize it. You can try it with a concave mirror. If you are sufficently far from the mirror you will see your face appear closer to the mirror. The effect works better with your hand. Your hand must still be a sufficient distance from the mirror but your hand will appear upside down but it will appear to be coming out of the mirror in 3d. It's a standard magnification mirror and you can test out the effect in the mirror quite easily. What I want to understand now is why there is that blurring. It makes sense that when something goes from infinite distance on the other side of the lens that it will after that appear to be in front of the lens that in between it would be blurry and not work. Maybe it's due to the fact that your eye can see a flat wave-front. An object an infinite distance away will have a flat wave-front. The moon will give you a spherical wave-front with a radius the distance of the moon to your eye. Such a sphere would for all intents and purposes be completely flat. Similar to how the earth feels completely flat. Nothing normal creates a wave-front that is concave. Your eye then would not be able to handle a concave wave-front. Whatever wave-front you see must allow the eye to turn it into a point on the retina. A concave wave-front is a wave-front the eye can't handle. so the lens is capable of producing a spherical wave-front and a flat wave-front and also a concave wave-front if the wave-front entering it has a sufficiently large radius. It will then create a converging wave-front. Since this wave-front is converging it will then converge at a point in front of the lens. after that point the wave front is again convex rather than concave and the eye can now focus it to a sufficiently small point. It depends too on how well the human eye lens can adapt. Anyway I guess if you want objects to pop out of a picture you will have to make them converge in front of theimage and they must do so. I'm thinking that a lenticular lens could handle it. Each lens is so small that it will project an image into the front that is not too far behind the lens. the trouble is that the size of the lens would have to change depending on how close you want the object to appear. To make an object appear further away you could then use a concave resin mold to make a very large convex lens to push back the further away objects. It would take a lot of work. A lot of times the first efforts look terrible to anyone who doesn't understand the struggle. It's like in a movie where a tiny insignificant flaw in the end result causes the protagonist to completely abandon his plan and go back to the drawing board. No successful engineer does that. But a non engineer will see a slightly flawed result and think "you've failed completely you should give it up".
I believe a lenticular lens will do something similar. I'm hoping that a lenticular lens placed in front of a fish-tank will cause the fish to appear outside the tank. Since lenticular lenses are so tiny perhaps simply putting a lenticular lens over a painting I can then vary the distance of objects by painting on layers of lenses stacked one on top of another. The further away the object should appear the further away it will be in the stack. This one to one correspondence will greatly simplify the process. It would be really cool if you could actually make a 3d painting by simply stacking lenticular lenses. These lenses may be custom lenses with an odd shape though. Still it's worth a try. Lenticular is simply a sheet of lenses that magnify in the x direction but not the y. That's all I need though to create the illusion of depth. magnifying lenses push things back. They do seem to blur the image. Maybe the lenses are too small. I'll have to figure out what they are doing. I do have a sheet of lenticular film. I guess my goal in all this is to make 3d simpler so that an artist can create 3d paintings.
