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I've acquired a new superpower

danielwirtz.com

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Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#391

Post by mewpmewp2 »

prmph wrote: post #260
jeffhuys wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To reduce eye strain, don’t cross your eyes, but relax them (so, the other way). Instantly clear and snaps together as if magnetic.

A simple trick to doing this, in case it's not clear how to do it, is to try focusing on an imaginary point behind the screen as you look at the images. You will see a third image between the two start to come into focus. Now relax your eyes and look at that image. Simple, and quite a bit more relaxing than crossing your eyes. The only disadvantage to this method is that it seems there is a limit to how wide the midd…

I was still unable to do this, not sure what I am doing wrong, but I can't get over the sense that I am always directing only one of my eyes. I can't move them independently.

Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#392

Post by itishappy »

antihero wrote: post #215
rwmj wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent far too much time as a twenty-something generating autostereograms, which seems to have trained my eyes. I was able to "cross" the images on this page very quickly.

Is that the crossy-eye porn?

Better known as Magic Eye, but yes.

Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#393

Post by sirobg »

Pxtl wrote: post #288
sirobg wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a training method for divergence? Similar to the finger moving closer and closer to the upper nose technique, for convergence.

It's a little more abstract since you don't have handy moving-reference-object like your finger, but: Place the picture in front of something deep, like a long hallway. Look off at something in the distance behind the picture, like the end of the hallway. Notice how the edge of the picture is a double image. Focus on gradually resolving the edge of the picture down from double-image to single-image, and then do the r…

Damn! After reading this I was surprised by the fact that this sounded very familiar.

I actually "practiced" a lot like this because I was always amused to notice how we could basically "see through" objects with this double-image thingy (see experiment below).

So I decided to film myself... and I was actually already doing a divergence! Not convergence!

Thanks a lot for your comment which made me realize that.

Experiment:

1. place your phone (handy size/shape for the experiment) in front of one eye (X), at about 20cm.

2. close the other eye (Y) and look at your phone

3. Open Y and look straight without focusing on the phone. By blinking Y, the double-image should appear/disappear, as if it was unveiling what's behind your phone.

4. By closing X and with Y open, looking at your phone, you should see it displaced from where it was when X was open and Y was closed. The size of this displacement is equal to the size of the double-image transparent part.

Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#394

Post by telchior »

warner25 wrote: post #348
duxup wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Probably my peak fame right there. My son and I always make jokes about everyone's 5 minutes of fame. Some random person on the jumbotron at a sporting event "Yup, there's his moment, it's over now." At least yours got you something ;)

Totally indulging in this side discussion: I remember thinking in high school and college that fame was the end-all of life, telling people that my goal was to have my own Wikipedia page. I saw it as something like the combination of being a "cool kid" (but for, you know, the whole of society instead of just one's school) and a sort of immortality. Anyway, over the last couple of decades as an adult, besides realizin…

Length of remembrance aside, the idea of fame as immortality has always confused me on different grounds. It's not how fame works: we remember factoids, not people. It's a bit different if the fame is a work of art, but then the thing with immortality (sort of) is the art, not the person that made it. I might remember 7 things about Teddy Roosevelt, which are admittedly very cool and impressive things, but those things do nothing to represent the complex individual he actually was.

This may be something I'm making up, but I have the feeling that the fame = immortality concept came out of legacy: people wanting to create a family that continues on after themselves (and is rich, powerful, etc). Which makes sense, because then we're talking about a logical extension of the reproductive instinct. But in the modern world even that seems unreachable to me: we're so utterly different from our grandparents that we might as well be aliens, and the same will probably hold true for our own grandchildren.

I guess all that puts me in the Mike Tyson school of thought on legacy: "We're just dead. We're dust. We're absolutely nothing."

Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#395

Post by joshuaissac »

claiir wrote: post #206
jeffhuys wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To reduce eye strain, don’t cross your eyes, but relax them (so, the other way). Instantly clear and snaps together as if magnetic.

This is called “divergence” [1] and is less straining on your eyes than crossing them (“convergence” [2]) while being equally as effective spotting differences, even on video. It’s also what your eyes naturally do when you watch stereoscopic 3D with tinted glasses—the stereoscopic images are pulled out (divergence) not pushed in (convergence/cross-eyed). I’ve been doing this since I childhood. If you get good at it,…

Convergence highlighted the differences for me in all four images.

Divergence only worked for me in the cat bear image. For the others, I could see a combined image but I could not see any differences highlighted, even though I knew what to look for.

Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#397

Post by d3VwsX »

prashnts wrote: post #357
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...

What really helped me was doing some sessions with an Orthoptist to reeducate my eyes. I used to see double when stressed sometimes and could never imagine to converge/cross my eyes and retain focus. With the reeducation I was able to see the Impossible one in focus after a couple tries.

I had to see an eye doctor at the hospital when I was ~7 and I got to do some exercises, but I never learned to cross my eyes, and then it was like it probably wasn't very important since I did not have to go to the doctor again and no one mentioned it so I just went on with my life and it seems overall like not being able to cross my eyes is not a huge problem. But I guess it may be connected to my complete inability to see 3D effects or figure out how to see anything in the images in the article.

Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#398

Post by biot »

nayuki wrote: post #68

I discovered this trick independently about a decade ago, to use cross-eyed viewing to easily spot differences between two similar images. Like you said, the parts that mismatch appear to shimmer and be unstable, making them obvious. However, I feel eye strain from doing it, so I prefer other methods. 99% of the time, I do https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_comparator instead, just switching between two images with…

Fun fact: it's a different device, but the principle is the same as the device used in the documentary Tim's Vermeer. It results in the images overlapping between your left and right eye and you simply paint until the difference goes away.

Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#399

Post by ctchocula »

Gollapalli wrote: post #376
warner25 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally indulging in this side discussion: I remember thinking in high school and college that fame was the end-all of life, telling people that my goal was to have my own Wikipedia page. I saw it as something like the combination of being a "cool kid" (but for, you know, the whole of society instead of just one's school) and a sort of immortality. Anyway, over the last couple of decades as an adult, besides realizin…

I think the desire for fame isn't an inherently bad thing. > He was the man most gracious and fair-minded, > Kindest to his people and keenest to win fame. Those are the last lines of Beowulf. A man who won great fame among his people by slaying monsters and dragons. It's telling that the final line of the poem ends with his most dominant trait, "and keenest to win fame." Wanting fame is not wrong, and is far from sh…

"True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, in writing what deserves to be read, and in so living as to make the world happier and better for our living in it."

Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#400

Post by v-erne »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #371
amingilani wrote: post #266

I'm frequently surprised by the amount of seemingly ordinary skills I picked up as a bored child that other people didn't. This was an obvious way to solve those "spot the difference" pictures in magazines. I wonder what skills other people picked up that I didn't. Some recent example of things I shared: + When your belt buckle hangs a little loosely on the front of your pants. You can hook the buckle's prong onto th…

> I'm frequently surprised by the amount of seemingly ordinary skills I picked up as a bored child that other people didn't. This was an obvious way to solve those "spot the difference" pictures in magazines. Conversely, I'm amazed by the amount of things I discover as an adult are not common experiences or skills for people, despite being considered as such. This includes, for example, having an inner voice (which I…

>> Well, it turns out what they said was true for them, but is not true for people like me, who can't visualize to save their life.

I used to be exactly like this - I could not visualize anything. Which was very perplexing for young me - I was astonishingly good at math (winning some country level math competitions even) but could not get past some arbitrary but somehow low level geometry problems. Then it struck me - I could not see the solutions in my head, only on paper, which drastically limited my search space.

But latley after years od doing other thing (including more artsy stuff like drawing) I discovered that I was wrong - its it possible to learn, its just that some people gets this faster and with little effort. For me it was just a other few thousend hours of doing staff that accidentally expanded my visualization ability and then "miracle" happend.

The same was with my supposed tone deafness - guess what, I only believed my self info being tone deaf (real tone deafness is very bery rare). I just was lazy in this departament (in building my ability to perceive tones).

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