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I've acquired a new superpower

danielwirtz.com

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Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#361

Post by TeMPOraL »

1. Get a bit closer to the screen so you can see both images clearly.

2. Now, cross your eyes and aim to overlap both images.

3. Draw the rest of the fucking owl.

Seriously. Ever since my physics teacher in high school tried to get the class interested in stereograms, everyone and every article I see talking about it treat "crossing your eyes" as an atomic, trivial step. It isn't. I for one have no first clue how to do it, it's not a distinct operation I know how to perform. Perhaps this is because I am nearsighted and wear glasses.

Still, I wish articles like these focused on explaining how to do the whole cross-eye thing, because once you master that, everything else becomes instantly self-apparent and doesn't need further explanation (I know because I did manage to accidentally cross my eyes once or twice while looking at a stereogram, so I know how the effect looks like).

EDIT: FWIW, I compensate by using another trick for diffing documents with Mark I Eyeball - get them printed on separate pieces of paper, put one on top of the other, and hold in front of you with some bright light behind you (Sun, or your phone's flashlight, will do). Not as good as crossing your eyes, but something I can reliably do.

Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#362

Post by satvikpendem »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #187

We got a magic eye book when I was maybe 6 - some time early elementary school. After learning how to do it, and also trying it by crossing my eyes to see an "inverted" image, I started doing it whenever I saw some repeating pattern IRL. It was most interesting when it was slightly uneven, for example a fence with sloppily applied vertical planks. Doing the magic eye would make it seem like some of them are closer to…

Now try it with various colors, some people can see "impossible" colors [0].

[0] https://preview.redd.it/yaiyf2bi9aa31.png?width=640&auto=web...

Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#364

Post by K0balt »

lenkite wrote: post #247
Workaccount2 wrote: post #43

At a local bar they had a game machine, and if you got a high score on any of the games, your tab for the evening was free. One of the games was a "spot the differences" between two pictures with an ever decreasing timer for each round. Using this trick I was able to easily surpass the high score, and garner a crowd watching me perform this mind numbing feat. Probably my peak fame right there.

Failed to perform the technique despite multiple retries, but didn't have any issues spotting differences the normal way for all except the impossible mode - which just felt like it would be tedious. My usual method is just to brute-force linear scan from left to right, top-to-bottom. May not be elegant, but it works.

Fun fact- when I was a teenager, my friends and I set up a stand in a local mall selling those “magic eye”posters. We made bank for a few months. But, there are actually a lot of people that medically cannot use the technique, or at least for whom it is extremely difficult or less vivid. Severe astigmatism, (obviously) blindness in one or more eyes, and certain attention deficits or fidgety types often have a difficult time.

I, on the other hand, 37 years later,am basically permanently crosseyed from the experience lol. It somehow became a resting state for me from all of the practice, so I’m always doing it on any kind of repetitive patterns, and even “successfully” on random ones which does some really weird stuff in your visual cortex.

Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#366

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #361

1. Get a bit closer to the screen so you can see both images clearly. 2. Now, cross your eyes and aim to overlap both images. 3. Draw the rest of the fucking owl. Seriously. Ever since my physics teacher in high school tried to get the class interested in stereograms, everyone and every article I see talking about it treat "crossing your eyes" as an atomic, trivial step. It isn't. I for one have no first clue how to…

[deleted]

Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#367

Post by justinl33 »

human stereo vision processing has incredibly sophisticated noise filtering capabilities that are still hard to replicate in software. The shimmering effect people report is essentially your visual cortex highlighting areas where the stereo correspondence fails.

Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#368

Post by scrozier »

smusamashah wrote: post #242
soco wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't overlap the images to save my life - they get like halfway there and that's it...

There is a way to help yourself. Put the pair of images in front of your eyes. Bring your finger between your face and the image. Now look at your finger. Move your finger back and forth. While doing this, notice that at a particular distance, the images in background will perfectly overlap each other. That's your moment. Pull out your finger and look at that image. --- Should take lot less tries to learn doing it wi…

The finger trick did it for me. As mentioned elsewhere, I used to do this academically (looking at protein structures), but I couldn't easily get back in the groove here without the finger.

Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#369

Post by Ericson2314 »

soco wrote: post #65
Workaccount2 wrote: post #43

At a local bar they had a game machine, and if you got a high score on any of the games, your tab for the evening was free. One of the games was a "spot the differences" between two pictures with an ever decreasing timer for each round. Using this trick I was able to easily surpass the high score, and garner a crowd watching me perform this mind numbing feat. Probably my peak fame right there.

I can't overlap the images to save my life - they get like halfway there and that's it...

That was me at first.

I think the "cross eyed" phrase is a bit ambiguous.

What I ended up with (I think) is a focal point not closer than the screen but farther than it. My eyes didn't want to do it at first but then they did.

What is weird about it is the focusing and focal point are out of sync --- my brain can do it but the weird feeling is one of "gosh, this thing is a lot closer than it should be" where "should be" is based on focal point, and "is a lot closer" is based on focus.

Don't want to do this too much, feels like I could easily decalibrate my brain for real life lol.

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