How to view in 3D: Take a pair of sunglasses. Cover your right eye with a sunglass lens. View the game with both eyes open. Works best at fullscreen in a bright room with dark sunglasses. Activate fullscreen with the button at the bottom right of the screen. Control your spaceship with up and down arrows. Fire with Z, X, or right arrow.

Spaceship 3D -- Pulfrich Effect Proof of Concept

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Spaceship 3D -- Pulfrich Effect Proof of Concept

by jackson_allen

Cart #47701 | 2017-12-27 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA

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This 3D effect works using a phenomenon known as [the Pulfrich effect], which I learned about from [this video by Tom Scott] that explains it quite well.

I wanted to see if I could make a 3D effect in PICO-8 using this, and I could! Some people have more difficulty seeing the illusion than others, but it's certainly there.

To create the effect, all I really had to do was have the background move past the player at a constant speed. (It would also work if the player moves past the background at a constant speed.) To have a 3D effect with a leftwards-moving player or rightwards-moving background, the sunglass lens would have to be put over the left eye. The outlines on the player and the enemies also helped to make them pop out of the background.

The effect is pretty neat and not too hard to implement in a PICO-8 game, so I'd like to see if anyone else tries a similar technique in their games.