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
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.
I see them inverted. I’m left handed, I figure that has something to do with it
It sounds like you might be looking at the left image with your right eye and the right image with your left eye. That’s what happens when you cross your eyes instead of looking past the image.
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.
Yes, you have to imagine you are looking into a mirror at yourself and focus your eyes on that place; look past the image.
Yep. There was one on the Sunday comics page every week when I was a kid, and I learned how to do it then. I never understood the people who can’t do it, or thought it was fake.
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.
I finally realized how to reliably do it in my early 20s (a while ago now) but still can to this day. Just have to start with it at my face haha.
Not usually, no.
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.
thinking it’s a joke is REALLY funny to me
Yes. I can change my vision’s focal point and focus distance at will, so it’s usually easy even though my eyesight is getting fucky with age.
Yes.
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.
Im in my 30s and learned a few years ago, my brother in law showed me how. Was super cool, I had always thought it was people trolling
I can view the convergent (cross-eyed) ones no problem. I managed once to focus on the divergent ones with like 30 minutes of practice, but I had trouble focusing normally afterwards for like an hour so I haven’t tried since.
Ya I was wondering the whole time if this was going to cause some long term damage
It’s a skill. You get better with practice.
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
