Can you see magic eye pictures?
As a not quite middle aged dude, I only just now figured out how to see magic eye stuff. I tried a couple times in elementary school but didn’t get it so I stopped. Had a few drinks earlier, stumbled on some magic eye pic that I could see clear as day and it blew my mind a little
Absolutely loved them as a kid! Had a quite a few books.
You can do them two different ways. The normal way with the objective popping out towards you and an inverted way with crossing your eyes that inverts the shape.
Bring the page close to your nose, let your eyes kinda naturally loose focus from distance. Then slowly start to pull the page back and you should get it.
Kinda difficult to describe.
Check back when you are sober and see if you get it to work.
For the cross eye version you just need to hold out the page at normal viewing distance and cross your eyes till the 3d image pops.
Sounds like you are doing it the regular way. Which is the more difficult one for most people that have issues with magic eyes.
Glad you got to experience them!
Here’s another one for ya! If you do it the right way you’ll clearly see the turtles head pop out towards you and with the cross eye way it’s quite difficult to recognize the head when it’s pushed backwards.
The way this works is that the image is designed to appear ‘beyond’ the surface it is printed on. It’s much easier to relax your eyes and pretend you’re looking at what’s ‘behind’ the paper. Kind of like 3d chalk art on the road in a way.
The other way of crossing your eyes works because you’re swapping the left and right eye, which gives a different, inverted appearance. Instead of a foreground image popping out of the background, it looks like the other way. Like looking in a box, kinda.
I can do both, but the latter is more difficult, sometimes requires a specific distance, and can be painful if you force it. If the image is too big, you may only be able to see a part of it. I think the first method is easier to do and to learn/train. Either way, you aren’t looking at what’s ‘on the surface’.
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The best way I can explain is: pretend you’re sitting on the toilet, really tired and you have nothing to look at so you just lose focus and gaze at random stuff. When the tiles or cracks start to make pictures that aren’t there, that’s kind of the effect you want.
Oh that one is a good one, it’s very busy. Using the first method the trees are on the ‘bottom’ and everything progressively pops out with the fish/turtle on ‘top’.
The other way is reverse, the trees are on the ‘top’ and the fish are on the ‘bottom’ (like I’m looking in that ‘box’). It’s also really hard to see the whole picture this way, but that’s just me.
Also, ‘In a Box’ might not be the best analogy, you can make one that intentionally feels like you’re looking inside something – it’s just that most of these are made to pop out at you.
This works, but the quicker method for me was to hold the book over my head, out of my line of sight while I focused my eyes on something a little farther away (a few feet away is fine). Then you can simply move the book downward into your field of vision while refusing to let your eyes refocus. It should be blurry, because you’re still focusing past it, despite it being right in front of your face. Then just relax and let your brain do the work.
This method got by far the quickest and most reliable results for me, most pop suddenly into view in just a couple seconds.
I think this method works best because you’re using established muscle memory to focus your eyes on an object at a measurable, consistent distance, and then just not letting them change. Removes several variables from the equation.
www.reddit.com/r/MagicEye/s/ogZeqQWwpY
This is what made it work for me, I was looking down a hallway then glanced at that pic keeping my head and phone still then letting it focus on the picture as if it was in the distance, the amount of detail is so crazy
You need a repeating visual pattern, a fairly busy one. Then you need a greyscale image of what you want the “magic” picture to be. You deform the repeating pattern by the intensity of the greyscale image.
When your two eyes overlay the background images, your brain highlights the distortions and interprets them as depth… at least if your eyes are good enough to give your brain that information in the first place.
If you want to know more, the algorithm to do this is public, and you can set it up in eg. javascript in an afternoon.
My parents were of the opinion they were an elaborate hoax until they had me draw what I saw in one of them.
This was in a newspaper 30 or so years ago maybe. The image was accompanied by a depth-map image of what should be visible, but they covered that up. Then they asked if I'd looked at the newspaper before them because, even with my terrible art skills, it was clearly what was in the depth-map version.
I think they believed me in the end though.
It’s harder than it was before I needed bifocals, but yeah.
Once you learn the trick of it, it gets easier to do.
I wanna say I was late teens/early twenties when they first started showing up in my area, and I stood in the store I first saw one for like a half hour trying to see the image. My vision was kinda bad across the board, even then. But I got the first one, which was a boat, and then flipped through the rest of the selection they had, maybe five or six different ones?
But any time I got new glasses, it would take a few minutes to adjust when I’d run across one again. Same if I needed new ones.
They really are fun
Yeah, but I have to stick my face right up close and slowly move it away to do so.
Phone/tablet screens work best for it.
Someone made a modified version of Quake back in the day, that rendered to stereoscopic 3D in a white noise pattern.
It was such a mindfuck to play!
You get 3D depth but no colors or shades or contrast. It’s just shapes moving. So doors that were flush with the wall were impossible to see, but enemies in dark rooms were fully visible because there is no light or dark.
I like to imagine I got to experience what a bat sees with echolocation.
Yes.
The instructions say don’t cross your eyes but that’s horseshit and probably why so many people fail to see them.
My method is to cross my eyes, then uncross them slowly until the 3d effect appears, then hold on that position.
But then you see them inverted.
3d cross eyed pictures and magic eye work in similar but different ways
Yes. They require stereoscopic vision. When I was doing research on 3D displays about 10% of subjects had to be rejected because they were stereo blind. They had no idea they were that way.
One woman said that explains why she had the nickname clunk in high school. She had a habit of rearending cars.
So depending on why you might be able to train it. If you don’t have a lazy eye and have good vision you may want to look into it.
If your brain is just not fusing two good images there is a good chance you can train it to do so. Having done experiments in this field I can tell you it makes a measurable difference in performance.
A good read on the subject is below. The part where she first sees a tree in 3D is a good example of what you are missing.
Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist’s Journey Into Seeing in Three Dimensions by Susan R Barry
I’m full of random questions
If you could only eat 1 dish forever without worrying about vitamin intake or macros, what would it be?
What would your plan be if you woke up tomorrow and everyone else on earth disappeared without a trace?
What’s a skill you want to learn and what’s stopping you from learning it?
What’s the largest animal you think you could beat in a fight with just your hands?
You stumble upon all the dragonballs, what is your wish?
Oh this is easy!
Lasagne - its so versatile. I’d usually keep it realy light on mince and boost the vegetables, though. So many textures and ways to play with flavours, it’d be ages before it got old.
Alone? I dunno. Sleep or gooning, probably
Largest animal: a med-small dog? Like a whippet or something.
I don’t understand the dragonballs stuff. Probably just too them down a hill (we’ve got some really steep streets for this in NZ)
Good choice garfield
No survival plans?
Reasonable choice
The dragonballs from the manga/anime dragonball summon shenron the dragon when you collect them all and you’re allowed to make 1 wish, even including bringing people back from the dead
TheReanuKeeves
BroBot9000
BurgerBaron
ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠
Venus_Ziegenfalle
Lady Butterfly she/her
Sir_Kevin
southsamurai
Blackmist
agamemnonymous
MinnesotaGoddam