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I'm spending this New Year holiday in sunny Florida.

One of its most beautiful places is the Everglades: the endless sea of grass, extending to the horizon, as far as the eye can see and beyond, and teeming with life.

There are all kinds of animals there. Herons, egrets, anhingas; fish, turtles, snakes; otters, skunks, small rodents; and of course, the king of Florida's wetlands, the American alligator.

The alligator is a well-oiled killing machine. It's motionless and extremely energy efficient when resting, but deadly fast when hunting. When the alligator is hunting, its eyes instantly track the faintest motion — and a fierce jump in any direction will follow immediately.

I was on a guided tour, and the tour guide mentioned that the alligators have binocular vision. The fields of view of their two eyes overlap, giving the predator the ability to estimate the direction and the distance to its prey more accurately.

We humans also have binocular vision. It allows us to see the world in three dimensions. When we are looking at an object with our two eyes, each eye sees it at a slightly different angle. The closer the thing is to us, the more the difference. This effect is called binocular parallax, and our brain can use it to estimate the distance to the object.

There are ways to trick the brain into believing something is 3D while it's not. To do this, we need a way to project a different image into each eye. There are lots of ways to do that: think holograms, polarized glasses, tilt cards, and many more.

Most of those methods require special equipment and materials, either to see or to produce the image. Maybe even both.

However, there is a way to see a three-dimensional image even on a simple piece of paper (or a plain LCD monitor without any 3D capabilities). It is technically called an autostereogram but most people know them as Magic Eye pictures.

A picture like this looks like repeating patterns of random dots or characters. The frequency of the patterns encodes the three-dimensional image: the close is the part of the image to the observer, the more frequent are the patterns.

It takes some effort to see the depth in what at first seems to be a random dot pattern. Not everyone can do that on the first try. There are lots of resources online which teach how to do that. The good thing is it's like riding a bicycle: once you got it right for the first time, there's no going back, it's always there with you.

Ever since I was a kid, I have been fascinated by the stereograms. So the moment I heard the words "binocular vision" from the tour guide, I instantly knew what would this New Year post be about.

Let's make a stereogram in PostgreSQL!

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