Magic Eye: A New Way of Looking at the World, 3D illusions: Volume 1

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Not long after meeting, Baccei and Smith designed another autostereogram advertisement—this time with a hidden airplane—which ran in American Airlines’ inflight magazine, American Way. At the bottom of the ad, he urged readers to solve the puzzle, adding a disclaimer that to see the hidden message you had to diverge your eyes, as if you were looking at a faraway object. The eyes normally focus and converge at the same distance in a process known as accommodative convergence. When viewed with the proper vergence, an autostereogram does the same, the binocular disparity existing in adjacent parts of the repeating 2D patterns.

Magic Eye - Wikipedia

Once this is done, the images around the matched patterns quickly become clear as the brain matches additional patterns using roughly the same degree of convergence. When one moves one's attention from one depth plane to another (for instance, from the top row of the chessboard to the bottom row), the two eyes need to adjust their convergence to match the new repeating interval of patterns. Baccei had been using clip art in the backgrounds of his autostereograms and was interested in improving the aesthetics of his gaze toys, but he had no artistic background.One of the images appeared in the American Airlines magazine American Way, where it caught the eye of Japanese businessmen. If the level of change in convergence is too high during this shift, sometimes the brain can lose the hard-earned decoupling between focusing and convergence.

Magic Eye, A New Way of Looking at the World by Cheri Smith Magic Eye, A New Way of Looking at the World by Cheri Smith

a b If a two-image stereogram, wallpaper, or random-dot autostereogram designed for wall-eyed viewing is viewed cross-eyed, or vice versa, all details on the z-axis will be reversed – objects that were meant to be seen to rise above the background will appear to sink into it. Most people don’t think of Magic Eye an exercise in considered graphic design, but that’s exactly what it is.By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. Baccei was mesmerized by autostereograms as well as by the image that ran next to the story in Stereo World—a black-and-white rectangle filled with what looked like TV static, but revealed a series of random circles and dots when you diverged your eyes.