21–30 of 49 posts
I have never in my life been able to see one of these things correctly, and I've tried since about age 7 or so. One day!
Ha! A blast from the past. Who remembers buying those Magic Eye books? I had some friends as a kid who could not see them. And remember struggling for a week to see them myself. After finally getting it I felt like I was in an exclusive club somehow.
The way I assume it works is that our brains naturally filter out patterns so we can see the interesting stuff. In a stereogram, the underlying image is XOR'ed with a random pattern that is repeated, and therefore filtered out by our brain. Interestingly, the repeated pattern is not constant, so if you XOR the image against the first instance of the pattern it will look increasingly noisy as you get further into the picture.
Ha! A blast from the past. Who remembers buying those Magic Eye books? I had some friends as a kid who could not see them. And remember struggling for a week to see them myself. After finally getting it I felt like I was in an exclusive club somehow.
I never was able to see them with my naked eye. Of course, the hacker in me want to figure it out, so I spent day figuring out how to reveal the picture. The solution is to XOR the image with an itself at a variable phase shift. There is one phase shift that reveals the general shape, then increasing it shows the 3-dimensional details (you'll want to bitmask with the general shape here). The way I assume it works is…
So I'll describe what you should expect to see. The image consist of 3 equal sized columns. Left and right columns are not part of the tetris field and have the same depth with the page itself (Z=0). Middle column is the tetris field with 5 playable columns which is the deepest layer on the page (Z=-2). And the tetris pieces are on an intermediate layer between those two layers (Z=-1). You now should be able to imagine what the game will be like. Hope that helps.
I have never in my life been able to see one of these things correctly, and I've tried since about age 7 or so. One day!
BTW, the book which introduced RDS: "Foundations of Cyclopean Perception" by Bela Julesz is considered one of the most influential books in cognitive science. With just a computer, using no invasive microelectrodes and animal sacrifices, he proved a fantastic result...stereopsis (fusion of the individual images from each eye) occurs before object recognition!