Watching movies in 3D is fun, if you can stand the splitting headache those headsets give you. For now they're the moviemakers' way of tricking your eyes into feeding your brain a false sense of depth perception, but a bunch of GIF-happy blogosphere denizens have discovered a more low-tech way to do that: By adding two vertical white stripes to your moving image.

Presumably they needn't be two perfectly vertical stripes, nor is it important that they be precisely white so much as in sharp contrast to the predominant tone of the image. But by adding a visually static element that interrupts, and becomes interrupted by, a moving object, our brains are fooled into perceiving depth.

Now the question is, would people be willing to sit through an entire movie that had those white bars in it? I'm guessing most wouldn't, though I'd prefer that to the goggles and the Advil.

To see more of these images, check out 3D Gifs on Tumblr.

Via Peta Pixel