It helped me in the beginning to stare at my finger that I put in the middle of the pictures, almost on the screen. Then I slowly brought it closer to my face, still staring at it, but trying to focus on the pictures. You hit a "sweet spot" somewhere along the way and it looks completely clear.
Nowadays my vision just snaps to it pretty easily. Bigger pictures may need some "forcing" at first, but keeping my eyes in the position after that is effortless, even if the picture is as big as the screen can fit (not sure how big mine is, but it's not a small one
).
As for those attempts of yours... They do kinda-work, but it only looks as if it's floating a bit above the background. That's because if you take two pictures about 15 or so centimetres apart, there's s certain kind of difference to them. stuff that's closer looks to be more to the left in the right-hand-side one, and vice versa.
You'd really have to get two cameras inside a game to easily do it, unless it's a game like Runescape, where it's easy to keep the view the same and move to exactly the right way and all that. (I'll add and summarize my stereopics of RS at the bottom of my post)
Why it doesn't work in TB is because you can't move th camera left to right, only clockwise and anti-clockwise around a center point. I have heard of scripts (or something) that can override this. If I got my hands on one, the results could be AWESOME...
I also tried this in M&B. No luck, too much movement around, although I possibly could have gotten an OK stereopic of the scenery. With the active modding community of M&B, there might be a double camera mod/script floating around somewhere, or someone might even make it if I presented the idea.
also, here's the link to the flickr group:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/stereo/pool/
___
Now the Runescape 3-D stereopics.
As you can see, they're not completely perfect, since the screenshots were full-screen, and it's hard to crop two different pics so that it seems as if they were identically cropped, unless you wanted to take the time to choose a center and take a set amount of pixels/centimeters from it in every direction.
They do work though, so most of you shouldn't mind.
Yes, the bubbles in the waterfall aren't the same. They move several frames a second, good luck trying to get the same exact frame in two pictures. The middle is also fuzzy. that is because I took two screenshots so that in the first one my character stands one square right of the other one. Without editing, however, the characters in the middle made it harder to keep focused on the 3D image. So I copied and pasted a monotonic part of the ground on the characters. The places do look extremely flat when viewed, but they don't mess up your focus like the characters did.