all i managed to do was make myself very dizzy
I've acquired a new superpower
111–120 of 583 posts
Re: I've acquired a new superpower
#112Who's been doing this since they we're maybe 7 years old :)
I figured everyone because I had a puzzle book that instructed readers to do this.
Re: I've acquired a new superpower
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a kid, I got a Magic Eye book and learned to see it by crossing my eyes (ie, focusing in front of the screen). I thought it was pretty interesting when I realized that I was seeing all the images inverted ("peaks" were "valleys" and vice versa) due to the way I was focusing. Alas, I never was able to see the images "correctly".
Instead of crossing your eyes to focus in front of the image, you have to uncross them and focus on something behind the image. Put your finger about six inches in front of your face and then look at the horizon. If the horizon is in focus you should see two fingers.
Focusing behind is much easier because you can get yourself started by focusing on an actual object.
Re: I've acquired a new superpower
#114The stars puzzle helped me find a speck of dirt on my phone screen.
The funny thing about the stars image is this is a common way to find asteroids, comets. It's not limited to just those. Only instead of a bunch of cross eyed astronomers, they overlay and align the images and do subtraction/difference filtering to see what's left. For comets/asteroids, the dot of interest will move between frames. Even just playing back the aligned images as a timelapse can reveal motion.
Re: I've acquired a new superpower
#115I've used this to quickly read through a few hundred page documents given to us only as a scanned pdf which was too low quality to run ocr (at the time) on. The sleazy counter party was very upset when I came back with notes on them not adding the changes we asked for on the drafts they sent back within minutes of them sending them back.
I can’t parse your second sentence.
Uncross your eyes! :-)
(They're saying that the person who send the contract was trying to trick them, and that they were upset when the trick was caught.)
Re: I've acquired a new superpower
#116If you've done Magic Eyes, this is straightforward. Was able to get all 3 of the test images quickly. This is with focusing beyond the screen. Focusing in front of the screen is something I am unable to do, and not for want of effort. Also, your eyes might accidentally do this if looking at tiled patterns, e.g. wallpaper. Relative image size (e.g. view distance) is important.
Maybe we are the opposite. As a kid, I could only do cross-eyed-focus-in-front-of-screen, but not "focus beyond the screen". Or a book at the time.
So I was able to see the 3D in Magic Eyes, but the 3D effect was inverted.
Today as an adult I am able to focus beyond the screen, but it's still much easier for me to do it cross-eyed.
I also got all the images in the post almost right away. But my eyeballs focused in front instead > _ <
Re: I've acquired a new superpower
#117When auto stereograms were all the rage in the late 80's I had a program on my Mac Plus that let me make/edit them and I used to edit for hours WHILE looking at them in 3D. Then one time I was walking down a hallway with a repetitive wallpaper pattern, my eyes did the thing, the entire hallway appeared to shift in front of me, and I stumbled and fell. Still to this day my eyes will sometimes automatically snap into '…
This happens to me easily inside cars with these dotted-breathing roof interior patterns. (Edit: g “perforated vinyl fabric”)
Well, worse than easily - sometimes I cannot get back to normal and am not sure how far it actually is, because the nature of the pattern allows to re-lock at every few cm. I just don’t know where I’m really looking at unless there’s an irregular object nearby.
Re: I've acquired a new superpower
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't overlap the images to save my life - they get like halfway there and that's it...
It's like https://triaxes.com/docs/3DTheory-en/522ParallelCrosseyedvie... which some people struggle with, somebody posted a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereogram to HN yesterday which some people get and others don't. (That's different from the "cross-eyed stereogram" because one of them involves having two images and the other one has one image with two images hidden in it)
I can understand why it's hard for some. I've landed on that wiki page a while ago and couldn't figure it out. Then found a similar thing on an itch.io page that was easier for me to figure out.
In these later examples (starting with the easy puzzle of the OP, and your 3d examples), I find that I do the process in two stages.
Unfocus my sight until the third image shows up in the middle at the correct size (as a blurry mess). Then try to focus the center image.
Re: I've acquired a new superpower
#119I've used this to quickly read through a few hundred page documents given to us only as a scanned pdf which was too low quality to run ocr (at the time) on. The sleazy counter party was very upset when I came back with notes on them not adding the changes we asked for on the drafts they sent back within minutes of them sending them back.
I can’t parse your second sentence.
a counterparty is the other person you're signing a contract with who sometimes lies to you and says they changed things when they didn't
Re: I've acquired a new superpower
#120Wait, that's not crossing your eyes, it's uncrossing them. Ordinarily if you look at something nearby, your eyes aim at a common spot. But when viewing a stereogram, you need to convince your eyes to aim at a spot more distant than the subject. This is easy with practice, however IMHO it helps to be significantly nearsighted. Then you simply take off your glasses, and can look at something nearby with infinity focus,…
For spot-the-difference, crossing your eyes is more effective and easier to "dial in" than uncrossing them. You're essentially making each eye look at the opposite image. If you try uncrossing, then you need to make sure the images are at the exact correct distance to cause them to overlap with that technique, because you can only uncross your eyes enough to look straight ahead.
Is that true? It seems that our eyes are mechanically capable of looking in divergent directions, what's the reason that we're not able to "uncross" them beyond looking straight ahead?
(Edit: Anecdotally I can confirm for myself that I'm not able to do it, so wondering if there's anyone that can.)