Magic Eye pictures - can you see them or not?

I could never explain how, must be muscle memory, but I basically adjust my eyes to instantly see them in as quick as a blink. I have a few useless talents like this...

one of my very favorite things to stare, though, at was perforated grating. like, any kind of regular patter of holes: chain link fence, radiator screen, whatever. i noticed very young that if you stared "just right" you could separate the perception of each eye and sort of control the overlay. if you synched them up properly, it gave a weird illusion of depth, made it look like the grating was floating out of spacial synch with whatever lay beyond it. entrancing.

Yeah! The pattern of black dots on white fabric on the headliner of my parent's hold VW Squareback was perfect for this. My mom said she used to do that with the ceiling tiles in church when she was a kid. (And I used to stare in a certain way until I could see bright auras around people in church. Nothing like boring ass church for encouraging kids to perform ocular neurobiology experiments.)

― Polly biscuit face (carl agatha), Thursday, May 10, 2012 6:21 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Wow OK so I'm not the only one who does this.

in thee 90s I spent ages being unable to see these, thinking it was a hoax etc, and finally (after a lot of pressing my nose right into them and moving backwards very slowly - repeat until something happens) managed to start seeing them, though it was quite hard work and some of them just wouldn't work for me

now it is not the 90s I am out of practice, or maybe it's that I've since developed a weird eyesight prescription; just looked at a couple and could see one (eventually) but the other would start to pop out into weird unconnected fragments and then collapse again

Top tip: try the same eye crossing or deep focus or whatever technique with spot the difference pictures.

Ha I have actually done that, briefly, before I felt like I was in a special migraine built from children's puzzle books

PS as a kid I had a lot of eye focusing issues, so yes, I have spent hours progressively defocusing my eyes to observe the weird 3Dish effects, but it was more of a "what is this thing I do involuntarily that gets me in trouble if I let on to my parents?" rather than "whoa, psychedelic"

(for my psychedelic optical thrills I just poked my fingers into my closed eyes until my mother caught me and told me I'd ruin my eyes foreverrrr. either this trick no longer produces the effects which so entranced me as a kid, or I no longer dare press hard enough)

^ still works for me. push hard enough to cause slowly building flashing and eventual pain, let off when it starts to get intense. best visuals are obtained not while pressing, but afterwards, when the effects fade away.

i'm opposed to the eye crossing technique the same way mel gibson hates vatican II

In case anyone thinks it was harsh of my parents to get cross with me for involuntarily crossing/defocusing my eyes, I remember being in a shop as a v small child loudly asking why most people had 2 eyes but some had 4:
"nobody has 4 eyes"
"but look at that person over there, THEY have 4 eyes"
"..."
"no mummy, look, look at that strange person with 4 eyes"

(while getting ever louder and pointing at a perfectly 2-eyed person, all because I was looking at them cross-eyed myself)

strangely it was not until my mid-20s that I started having to give opticians large sums of money

Weirdly It took me a while to figure out that the eye crossing/separation thing I'd always been able to do was how to see magic eye pictures. And now, thanks to the magic of iPad (ok I could have just used any old camera), I can see what I look like when doing it - an idiot. My left eye crosses all the way to the middle and my right stays put.

>_<

I'll be able to see the aliens among us, and their hidden messages of OBEY and CONSUME, before I ever manage to see one of those Magic Eye pictures.

You just have to cross your eyes!

poll needs a cross-reference with people who give a shit about Britpop

I was also the type to stare at things and overlap them, but quickly with a bit of eye crossing. I wear glasses now :O

Alright NV, two votes yes then. 0_o

don't cross your eyes! relax and stare at an imaginary point somewhere beyond the picture plane.

I can't break my eyes out of the habit!

yeah, crossing your eyes gives you an inverse of the magic eye image (talked about this on the other thread). like in the image below, if you cross your eyes, focusing on the space between yourself and the picture plane, you'll only see a shark-shaped cavity in the surface of the image. but if stare off at a point beyond the picture plane, you'll see a a three-dimensional shark hovering above the picture plane. cheggiddoot:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Stereogram_Tut_Random_Dot_Shark.png

animated version, très chouette:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Stereogram_Tut_Animated_Shark_Small.gif

Omg I feel you have changed my life in some small and no longer very significant fashion! Still having trouble doing it the right way though, I can snap into the eyes crossed view in a moment but after ten minutes trying the other way I'm only just starting to see it.

GAH I HATE THAT GIF SO MUCH

http://www.wingnuttoons.com/jabbranim.gif

better?

DON'T YOU PATRONIZE ME

:)

are magic eyes triangle wave? lamp, gr80, whiney, help me out here

fuck no, never worked for me and it drives me nutz

i too like staring at things

are magic eyes triangle wave? lamp, gr80, whiney, help me out here

(i am none of those but) shit yeah. speaking of, when does altered zones nostalgia kick in? i've got a few weeks free in september.

can't do these

I can never see them. In HS I worked a summer at a shop that had one of those books and I spent three months staring at it and still couldn't see it while other people would pick it up and see them all straight away. I was like Ethan Suplee with the sailboat magic eye in Mallrats.

<3

Well if any of you need a magic eye cracked let me know I offer faster service than any competitor or your money back.

That moving gif was the easiest one to see, for me.

I could never ever get these to work and then one day, I got so *tired* staring at one that my eyes all unfocussed and relaxed... and BAM, it swam into view suddenly.

Its impossible to explain how to see it but eventually you kinda work out how, you have to really learn to fight the urge to focus on the dots.

What I find trippy is once it goes all completel 3-d, you dont have to concentrate to make it stay that way - it just does, and if you move yr head around, the 3d image moves too!

Like even blinking doesnt "undo" it, but if you look away and back, that does.

Cant for the life of me make the animated one work, that said, the moving dots are way too distracting

these have never ever worked for me, i suspect because my left eye is so much weaker than the right

Never seen any of them, but I'm short-sighted in one eye and long-sighted in the other

One time I stared at a Magic Eye book for over an hour until I finally saw it... I had an awful headache for the rest of the day.

Soooo I'm not sure how to answer the question.

Oh wait.. I just saw the shark. Maybe I forgot that I knew how to see it. lol

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61cG6ONsBlL.jpg

sponge wax belly

in thee 90s I spent ages being unable to see these, thinking it was a hoax etc, and finally (after a lot of pressing my nose right into them and moving backwards very slowly - repeat until something happens) managed to start seeing them, though it was quite hard work and some of them just wouldn't work for me

now it is not the 90s I am out of practice, or maybe it's that I've since developed a weird eyesight prescription; just looked at a couple and could see one (eventually) but the other would start to pop out into weird unconnected fragments and then collapse again

― instant coffee happening between us (a passing spacecadet), Thursday, May 10, 2012 6:53 PM

Christ, I tried to keep myself from crossing my eyes and just let myself relaxing into seeing the topthread link, and it went all acid flashback on me and started grooving. Watery eyes.

There, I got it. But I just crossed my eyes the other way to make it pop out rather than in. I am a failure ;_;

Well I don't even know if you can cross your eyes two different ways? But usally my right eye dominantly crosses, so I let my left one 'lead.' Naturally I tried to look in a mirror to see if it actually looks different, but um, I was cross-eyed..

i saw one of these in 2007 and was really disappointed

The first few are entertaining if it's easy, but I can't imagine going through collective hours of struggle and headaches, and then, years later, THE BIG REVEAL:

http://joyerickson.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/magic-eye-key-0014.jpg

yeah, crossing your eyes gives you an inverse of the magic eye image (talked about this on the other thread). like in the image below, if you cross your eyes, focusing on the space between yourself and the picture plane, you'll only see a shark-shaped cavity in the surface of the image. but if stare off at a point beyond the picture plane, you'll see a a three-dimensional shark hovering above the picture plane. cheggiddoot:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/Stereogram_Tut_Random_Dot_Shark.png

If I cross them, and then do it "again" my eyes separate the image into the separate planes of distance on which they are constructed. During my psychadelic college years, I called this 'going deeper' and tried to do it w/ non-magic eye stuff

yeah, you can generate weird effects by controlling the amount of overlap between the images seen by each eye. much easier to do when crossing your eyes and inverting the stereogram than when looking into the depths beyond it and seeing it "properly".

Don Lawrence's 'Storm' has an entire book with Magic Eye backgrounds. Hmm.

thanks guys, now i'm gonna spend the evening looking at these things

How long until someone releases an album with one of these as cover art?

very surprised it hasn't happened already.

This is neat, but you definitely have to watch it in HD for it to work best:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AKtp3XHn38