Remedial Adventures in Magic Eye Pictures

[KayW]

This started with a whiny response by me to the following post:

I felt extremely lucky to have solved this quickly & am amazed & pleased many other muggles have, also.

For those still working, this is not an easy trip, IMHO.

More often than not to me metas are like those Magic Eye posters from the 90s where people were asked to find the hidden optical illusion. You either saw it right away, or you had to stare it for hours to see something, with your mind getting distracted and forming its own answers so you could do something more productive.

... as I have yet to ever see a hidden picture in these types of images.

[KayW]

@woozy wrote one of the most thoughtful write-ups I have ever seen on the topic and it inspired me to give it a serious try (for the thousandth or so time).

And like many a week 5 meta, I have NEVER been able to find the so-called illusion within those Magic Eye posters. I am convinced they're all a hoax. By all of yas. There's nothing there, I tell you!

I had a very hard time trying to explain to my uncle that they actually work and how. I became convinced he didn't want them to work and just liked complaining they didn't. My very first experience with them was some 25 years before they were invented. When I was sitting on a rocking chair with a wicker weaving seat and the pattern of the wicker were rows upon rows of little circles evenly spaced. I spaced out and my left eye focused on the row that was 10th from the bottom while the right eye focused on the row that was 14th from the bottom and they superimposed and I viewed both the 10th row (with one eye) and the 14th row (with the other row) as though they were same row. The effect was they seat was in hyper focus and floating some four inches beneath where it actually was. The neat thing was that because each circle I looked at was actually two different circles any discrepancy between the individual circles was blurred at and the result was that the mesh I was seeing was in hyper-focus and clean as the cleanest window I had ever seen. I reach down to touch it but my finger felt resistance four inches before where it appeared to be and my figure didn't come into focus.

It is worth trying to see these magic eyes because the result is FREAKIN' AWESOME. Every single one is the most AWESOME CRYSTAL CLEAN GLASS hyper-focussed image you have ever seen in your life! They are really amazing.

So here's how to do it. Notice the image with your eyes focused normally is a repeating pattern of 8, count them, 8 columns of blobby dinosaur patterns. No relax you eyes as though you are looking past your screen. Let the image go out of focus. You will start to see double vision. Your left eye will see the image a half an inch further to the left than your right eye will see it. Let that happen. Let your eyes relax and focus a little further out so the two images grow further apart. If you let your eye focus far enough the image in your left eye will be one column to the left of the image on your right. That is to say your left eye will see columns 2,3,4,5,6,7,8 super-imposed one what your right eye sees as columns 1,2,3,4,5,6,7. Column 1 in you left eye will be blurry and vague as will column 8 in you right eye. What you will see is 9 columns. The first column is column 1 seen by your left eye. the second column will be column 2 seen by your left eye superimposed on column 1 by your right eye. The third to 8th columns will be similar: the real column i seen by your left eye superimposed by the real column i - 1 seen by your right eye. And the 9th column will by the real 8th column seen by your right eye. The middle 7 columns will appear closer and in sharper focus than the two apparent edge columns.

Okay continue to focus your eyes further away and let the two images drift further apart and let the columns break apart until your left eyes vision of columns 1,2,3,4,5,6 are super imposed an your right eyes image of 3,4,5,6,7,8.

Now there are ten colums. The two our blurry and soft and the next inner two are closer but the inner six are in sharp focus. Now this is where it gets awesome. As the little blobs have discrepencies and as that is how stereoscopic depth perception works (if there are descrepencies in the images between the left and right eye we see that as something floating closer to us) we see the shape of a glass dino-saur in 3-D and it is F###ING AWESOME looking, as clean and sharp as the most polished glass.

And there is box CUT OUT OF YOUR COMPUTER SCREEN and the velociraptor is JUST FLOATING THERE IN SPACE!

It really *IS* worth trying to figure out how to see these because.... as fun, and cool and humorous it might be to mock complain about how you don't know what's going on.... actually seeing what *is* going on is way, way, way cooler!

TRY AGAIN!



.....

And on that note maybe I'll try for the umpteenth time to try and figure out what the heck this meta that everyone is pretending to see what I know just isn't really there.

[KayW]

So far I've had no luck. I found it really difficult to count the number of repeating columns - especially while trying to keep my eyes unfocused. So I created this copy of the image with some extra marks that I thought would be helpful:

If I am reading woozy's instructions correctly (always a BIG IF with me where following directions are concerned), I think I should see three lines when my eyes are close to properly unfocused: the original blue on the left, the red on the right, and a maybe purplish one in the middle where the two should overlap based on the two different perspectives.

Can someone who can "see" the image tell me if that is correct and if what they see when viewing the image here?

I have not been able to do that YET which may be due to eyesight issues on my part.

[woozy]

More like this (dang that is hard to draw or create when your eyes are crossed

When you have your eyes properly crossed you will see a blue line to the left over the velociraptors big rounded rump. The double red/blue line (which will shift a bit) will be about at the curve of her arched back, to the right the red line will go through her neck.

[Flying_Burrito]

I am afraid but I am hopelessly not seeing it either. Moved by contact lenses to the side to see if it would make it easier, but my brain gave me a "negative, ghost rider", as it keeps wanting to focus on each individual row of dinosaurs ( i.e, the blue dinosaur head on top with purple polka dots, the green dinosaur in the middle with yellow galoshes, etc).

[MikeM000]

Once Woozy drew the red and blue lines I saw it come into focus in 5 seconds or so. There is a big dinosaur (or maybe a sort of Heckle & Jeckle-style magpie?) in the middle almost the entire height of the picture; I think there is another behind it on the left side of the screen (much smaller) and 2 smaller ones to the right of it.

Also, Remedial Adventures in Magic Eye Pictures is my 9th favorite episode of "Community".

Sincerely,
Shirtless George Costanza

[woozy]

I am afraid but I am hopelessly not seeing it either. Moved by contact lenses to the side to see if it would make it easier, but my brain gave me a "negative, ghost rider", as it keeps wanting to focus on each individual row of dinosaurs ( i.e, the blue dinosaur head on top with purple polka dots, the green dinosaur in the middle with yellow galoshes, etc).

You have to look past the image. If you look at anything on the image your eyes will focus on that. Put a glass of water four feet behind your computer screen. Pretend your computer screen is a window and look at the glass of water.

[woozy]

I'm trying to figure out how to decode this with GIMP (I don't have a current licence for PhotoShop anymore) but I found this site

https://magiceye.ecksdee.co.uk/

Try loading the image url of "https://www.xword-muggles.com/download/file.php?id=10421"

Oh, I'll do a screen shot:

That's the image you will see... but in 3-D. And the coloration will be those silly dragon strands

[BarbaraK]

Back in the day, I had mixed results with these. Some pictures/some days I could see them, other times, no.

Woozy also inspired me to try again with this one. What worked was to start off with my phone very close to my eyes, like right at the tip of my nose, where I could not possibly focus on anything, and keep my eyes there as I moved the phone further away. After a bit, the three dimensional background came into focus, a bit more and there was the dinosaur.

Cool! Thanks!

[woozy]

Oooh... I have no way of filming this and loading an image but those of you proficient in PhotoShop *have* to try this!

Copy that image into you buffer/clipboard. Create a new image in photoshop (or GIMP or any sophisticated art program). Copy this image into a background layer. Then create another layer and copy another image. Change the visibility of the top layer from "Normal" to "difference". You will now have an entirely black rectangle. The is because the two layers are exactly so same so you see no difference between the two.

Select the move tool. Now press the right arrow button. This moves the top layer to the right a pixel (or maybe a few pixels). Now you will se a few grains of white as some pixels are different but most are the same. Keep hitting and it will get brighter and more colorful as the two layers have fewer similarities. But as the image is repeating columns as you get close to aligning with one column superimposed on the other it will get darker. And the image of a black dinosaur will emerge. These dark spots are where the adjacent comments have the same color. And that's the trick the other spots on a adjacent columns are slightly different.

EDIT--- Eek Never mind----But here's the neat thing. At one precise alignment (say you are super imposing at 0.95 inches) the colors that are the same (and form to back, tail, neck of the dinosaur) are slightly different than when you superimpose at 1.00 inches (in which case it is more of the legs and arm and nose that are the exact match). Then at 1.1 it is the round bush? egg? that are exactly the same. It is these descrepencies that cause the illusion of 3D I think.---- EDIT (actually those are were where the images are the *same* and you see depth textures. At 1.25 inches you see a huge patch where the over laps are *DIFFERENT* and that is where you see the image in huge bright colors. I just hadn't gone far enough.)

[KayW]

Thanks again woozy and everyone else. I have yet to be able to see this for myself but that Magic Eye Solver/ Viewer page is very cool and the next best thing until I can. (I've discovered that my left eye is WAY dominant - I had no idea - and I think have to train that slacker right eye to pick up more of the load. This also might explain my driving, haha )

[KayW]

And YAY! I finally saw my first Magic Eye. Okay, it's a meta, not a picture. But I saw it!

3D Magic Eye Meta