Stuff You Should Know - Magic Eye Illusions

Episode Date: July 20, 2023

What became the Magic Eye illusion fad of the 1990s was born by way of the stereogram of the 1950s (and even before that). It's a winding story that you'll love!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. You can't see her, but you can if you relax your eyes, lose focus. She may just pop right out at you and be like, hey, I'm Jerry, good to meet you. He thought it wasn't real. You need her, lazy eyes. Well, no, actually it doesn't work if you have lazy eye. I know, let's see opposite. We'll get to that later. I would love to see Jerry in a magic eye poster popping out in my room. All right.

You know? Well, you know, it's actually become so easy to do. There's so many programs out there now that you could do it, huh? You could. At the very least, the more capable and skilled stuff you should know, listen, or probably could. I'll just keep talking about it. There you go.

That's what we're talking about, though. If you are a person of a certain age, and you were either like a teenager or up probably in the 1990s, early 1990s, then you probably, at some point, much like Ethan Supply in the movie Mallrats would stand somewhere in a shopping mall at a wooden kiosk staring at a poster waiting for that shark or that sailboat to come out from the background of that poster. Yeah. The hidden trick. I tried it so many times and I think maybe one out of 50, I was able.

I was not good at it, but I have to say Chuck, after researching yesterday and today, my eye muscles have never been in better shape than they are right now. Did you try looking at them again? Yes, I've been popping and locking and like just, I'll be like, hey, give it to me. Bam, I'll see that one. Oh, let's see another one. Oh, good. Actually, I've got, yes, I did.

I finally relax, I guess is what it comes down to. But I've gotten to the point where I can, once I see it, I don't have to keep that focus. I can actually look around inside the picture from like different angles and stuff. It's really cool. Yeah, I got to that point too. To where like at first I would do the trick

where you hold it in like in the book version where you would hold it very close to your face and slowly back it away. Because as we'll see, that's one technique to see what the hidden picture. But then I got to where once you sort of can train yourself, then you can just sort of look at it like you said and you know the little trick with your eyes,

and then there's that polar bear or whatever. Yeah, but I should say it's been brought to our attention, I guess ever since the Millie Vanille episode, that even like that kind of definition is not necessarily enough for some of our listeners, so I feel like it's still like enough. Now, I think we should go a little further. If you've never seen a magic

eye poster, you know, generically called the stereogram. What we're talking about is a strange, seemingly random pattern of different colors almost splattered across a poster and that if you relax your eyes in a certain way so that you focus as if you're looking beyond the poster Like right through it. Yeah. In some sort of magic scientific way that will explain a three-dimensional image suddenly forms. You suddenly see a 3D image that you cannot see if you're not looking at it the right way. And when you do see it, it's almost inevitable. You're going to say, wow, or, oh, gosh, or something like that. It's thrilling every single time.

It is. It appears to kind of jump away from the rest of the image. But nice definition, but I think we should go back because there's kind of a long and winding road to how we eventually got to the early 1990s with these magic eye posters that were, they were real fed and we'll get to that, you know, they sold a lot of those things in a short amount of time, but it goes all the way back to the early scientist of the world trying to figure out how in the world when you have two eyeballs that are spaced about 60 something millimeters apart, you know, if they're spaced apart, they're going to be seeing things from a slightly different perspective. And how in the world do we do that and come up with like a solid focus on things? Yeah.

I mean, I had never really thought about it before, but binocular vision is what you're talking about. Yeah. By rights, we have two eyes, and like you said, they're separated by a certain amount of distance. So why don't we see two images of the world? Yeah. Very slightly ordered for one another.

Right. It turns out that if we did do that, we probably wouldn't be able to see with depth perception. We're very crazy. Kind of. It's called Stereoops be able to see with depth perception. It's very crazy. Kind of. It's called Stereoopsis is another word for depth perception. And it is in combining those two images that each eye gives the brain that we're able to see in one complete picture that has depth and richness. And maybe even a little kindness depending on what you're looking at.

Yeah, and the brain does this immediately. It figures it out so fast you don't even know what's happening. But we can go all the way back to our friend, Tolemie, who we talked about quite a bit. Yeah. Second century Roman astronomer. This is one of the early ideas that was put forward. As with all things, science, they put forward some ideas that were put forward. And, you know, they, as with all things sort of science, they put forward some ideas that aren't quite right

and they're refined over the years until they get to the reality of it. This is an inquiry right one. Yeah, inquiry right. Because Tolwamy thought that your eyes to now raise basically visual rays that hit an object. And when we're seeing something in focus,

that means it's even, it's kind of hard to explain how bad it is. The eyeball rays will converge on an object and when they converge on that object, that's when you can see something in focus, basically. And if they converge on it too much, they burn it to a cinder, right? Exactly. He picked up, there's two things. He added backwards. We were actually accepting

rays rather than shooting them out. So he was coming to getting there. And then he noticed that our two eyes create an angle. That's our focus. It can be wide, narrow, depending on what we're looking at. If it's far away, the focus is going to be at a sharper angle. If it's closer, it's going to be at a wider angle. And he was on to something, but he didn't, he was unable to really put two and two together, and then he died, and that was it for him. Yeah. That's right. So up next, I guess, we can flash forward to this Arab scholar name, all has in, is what I'm going to say. I think that's great. All right.

And he basically said, all right, what we have is an ability to sense this convergence of our eyes when they focus on an object. And what this is called, basically, I don't know if he even said the word depth, but it helps us figure out how far something is, which is depth. Yes. So his idea was that we could...

We had some sort of sense that we... It was so involuntary, we weren't even aware of it, and that's how we knew. That's true. Yeah, for sure, but still not quite there. About 600 years later, Kepler and Dave Cartt kind of picked up on something similar, and they said rather than being able to sense the degree of convergence that our eyes are focusing, we actually can feel how our eyes are rotating at any given point and that's how we know

where our eyes are focused or not focused. Yeah, the card said like Google-Eyes, you know? Exactly. And so it was just wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Finally, in the 1830s, an Englishman stepped up. His name was Sir Charles Wheatstone. And he said, I've got this, everybody, check this out. I have invented an invention that will prove that my hypothesis of binocular vision providing us one single image with depth is actually from well take a chuck. Well, you know what's funny is in my notes, I had Weedstone says quote, I got this.

Exactly, which is it? That's simpatico. What were you setting me up for? I don't know. Well he had an invention. Can I just describe that at least? Yeah, the stereoscope. Yeah, the stereoscope sat the first version of this that he introduced, sat on a table. There's a great picture. It turns out that Brian May of Queen is a big

wheatstone slash 3D stereogram binocular vision enthusiast. And so there's some cool pictures of him looking at this through this original stereoscope. So it sits on a desk and in the center, you put your eyes up to, you know, what looks like a little view master or VR headset basically. And it has these two angled mirrors, one for each eye. So when you look through it, it angles one eye out to the right and one eye out to the left. And in that peripheral vision on each side,

there's a little small wooden wall with a picture on each one. So one eye is looking at the left picture, the right eye is looking at the right picture, and you, you know, it has two little thumb holes that you hold. It's very elegantly, a little steampunk looking thing. It definitely is. And that was how he basically proved this by having each eye look at two separate things, but they're both flat, flat, flat images of the same thing basically.

That's really, that's key, right? So let's say you had an image of an apple cart. You have two pictures of that apple cart and your eyes are seeing each one, right? So let's say you had an image of an apple cart. You have two pictures of that apple cart and your eyes are seeing each one, right? Because there's that barrier in between your two eyes. So your eye is just seeing the left image, your right eye seeing just the right image, right? Yes.

The distinction here, Chuck, and this is where we'd stone like really laid the foundation for understanding binocular vision, is that each of those pictures has to be slightly different in perspective. That's right. So either there's a slightly different angle or you took one picture and then moved a foot to the left and took the other picture and those are what you're seeing. And what he showed is that the brain can sense the slight slight difference as a perspective. And that's what it uses when it combines two images

into one image in your field of view to give it depth. That's how it senses depth. Those differences in perspective or angle that each eye is feeding the brain as an image. Yeah, and if you're thinking the sounds like the little view master that you had when you were a kid, that's exactly what it is, same exact thing. Yeah, and the same way that like the computer went from like a room size thing to a PC,

to a laptop to our phone, this stereoscope did the same thing. It was a big clunky thing, the steam punk version, and then it got increasingly smaller and easier to handle and more handy, although it was much less revolutionary than the computer. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they made it more handheld. In particular, in the 1840s, there was a Scottish physicist who will be pretty prominent in this whole story named David Brewster, Sir David Brewster.

He's the one that invented, if you've ever seen one of these in a museum or something, sort of the early handheld version that looks like a little handheld steampunk VR headset basically. Yeah, like many binoculars with a slide. Yeah, coming out of it that you use for focus. Yeah, and you hold it up to your eyes and it blocks out the rest of the light and stuff. His more portable invention was coinciding with photography becoming more and more developed and sort of like proper photography. And so all of a sudden, it was this popular thing. And this was sort of the first fad of the stereogram.

There were a couple of big ones. It was one of the 1990s. And one in the mid-19th century Queen Victoria went nuts for this thing in 1851 at the great exhibition at Crystal Palace and all of a sudden people just wanted these things to play with and look through in Marvel ad. Yeah, I read from the 1850s to the 1930s when radio finally came in and took over that 1930s when radio finally came in and took over that there was basically not a parlor in the UK or America that didn't have one of these things like you just amuse yourself with them. The fact that

there were companies that were producing hundreds of thousands or millions of different stereoscopic images for you to look at, I mean you could just spend endless hours of entertainment looking to look at, I mean, you could just spend endless hours of entertainment looking at one thing or another, and they would take images of like scenic landmarks. Sure. Supposedly stereoscopic images of like Yellowstone, I think the Yellowstone area actually convinced Congressman back East that there actually was an amazing wilderness out there that should have that's worth preserving Yeah, exactly. It really made it pop in other words. They also very quickly started making porn with it Exactly everything that you would imagine people doing when they figured out how to make pictures that really stand out with depth

Yeah, they were like these are fantastic, But what's better than an landscape? Ladies' ankles. Pretty much. They original, the original piece of equipment used to make these were stereo cameras and they were these cameras with two lenses that kind of mimic the eyes. They're set about eye with the part. And those were around for a while. They're still enthusiasts that own stereo cameras, as we'll see in a little bit that kind of figures into how they became popular in the 90s. But in the United States, while all this was going on, American surgeon Oliver Windelholm's senior, Papa of Oliver Windelholm's junior of the Supreme Court fame. He's invented one in the United States,

and he's like, you know what, this thing's so great. I'm not even gonna patent it. I want all kind of companies to make these, and I want these spread far and wide. I guess he was a surgeon, so he wouldn't hurt or anything. Right. And people, I think he's the one that coined the term stereograph, and then the word stereogram kind of became the go-to

for these images. Yeah, everybody's like, close, we're gonna switch it up just a little bit. And still today, if you're an enthusiast into stereoscopic photography, the stereogram is usually the term that you use. All right, I think that's a robust 15 minutes. Yeah, all of the 19th century stereo gram viewers say,

Bully, Bully, Bully. That's right. Bully in 3D. So we'll be back to talk about the next development, which was the auto stereo gram right after this. If you want to know, then you're in luck. Just listen up to Josh and Josh Stuff you should know

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I'm Miles Taylor. Listen to the whistleblowers on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm a piece of... No. All right, check. Now we finally get to this stuff where I'm fascinated. Just riveted, right? Because it's enough that our friends Wheatstone and Brewster contributed the foundation

to our understanding of binocular vision. But along came, and I think the 1950s. Boy, that sounds like a craft cocktail bar, doesn't it? Bruce, we stone and Brewster. Like you have to have that arm band or else you can't get employed there. I just got really thirsty. Sorry, go ahead. There was a scientist, a neuroscientist named Bella Ulas, had to to chuck for that one,

who ran the sensory and perceptual processes department at AT&T Bell Labs. Again, I think I said in the 50s. And Yulas was, I guess, kind of focused on visual perception and figured something out. Just like just in the same way that Wheatstone's invention led to this need, party toy. Yeah, you as invention did the same thing, but neither one of them were trying to create

an amusement. They were creating a way to prove a hypothesis that they were interested in. What he did was come up with the random dot stereogram. Yeah, so this is, he basically start by, let's say you have like a square or something that you fill in randomly with black dots. And then within that square, you pick a part of it and decide on like maybe a shape or something. So within that square, you say, all right,

well, I'm going to select a circle within that, like maybe right in the middle. And I'm going to create a second square that's just like the first, except that circle in the center that I've selected is just going to be shifted just a little bit, kind of like what you're talking about, that slight difference of perspective. And then when you put these two squares side by side, and when you look at these two squares, you can look at it through a stereoscope if you have one. But the key here is that he was proved that like, hey, you can just do this with your naked eye.

If you learn the trick that people will be trying to figure out, you know, up until 2023 with future podcaster Josh Clark, where you unfocus your eyes, and then those circles appear to sort of separate from the background. Yeah, and so those two separate images, you still see them, but what they do is combine to make a third image in the center, and that's the one that has the, say, the circle popping out of it, right? Yeah.

And you was obviously created the foundation for magic eye posters with that. But what he did more than anything was show that what our brain does when it takes in those two separate images in slightly different perspectives because our eyes are separated just ever so slightly. It compares basically basically, pixel for pixel, each of the images that the eye send it, and matches it up. And then when it finds parts that don't quite match up,

it uses that to create the illusion of depth. And that's what his random dot stereo Graham showed that what your eye is doing is taking those two pictures and matching up every single random dot in there. And then noticing all this is in a nanosecond, noticing what it doesn't match up. And then that's that circle that pops out. And then the way that he proved it is because those two different pictures form a single image in the center. Right? So if you weren't looking at two pictures, you were just using two eyes at one picture,

then that effect would still be produced, and it really just kind of laid the foundation and showing just exactly how our brain makes binocular vision into depth perception. Right. So we're we're inching closer to the 90s and that that singular poster or coffee table book image that we all knew. But it came to us in the 1970s thanks to a student of U-Lezz's In the 1970s, thanks to a student of U-Lezz's named Christopher Tyler, who was a neuroscientist. He basically said, you know what? We don't even need the two pictures, everybody.

You're doing pretty good, but how mind-blowing would it be if we could do this all from a single image? He called it the auto-stereogram and basically made it to where it's sort of like this, like staring at a wallpaper. And in fact, I think was he the one who was? He was. Then it was Brewster who stared at wallpaper and that's how they figured that out. He was an odd duck, which is interesting.

But Tyler got together with a programmer named Maureen Clark and said, well, we can probably figure this out with math so that they created an algorithm that could insert these images into what looks like almost like white noise on paper. Yeah, and so they did away with all the crud. Those extra two images that still remain when they come together and form that illusory third image in the middle. So that you just see something as you normally would see it, but if you adjust your eyes just the right way, then that 3D image is going to come out. And now we finally arrive in the 1970s at the auto stereo gram is what they called it,

which became better known eventually as the magic eye poster. Right. So, if you're listening to this and you think, all right guys, this is the 1970 eye poster. Right, so if you're listening to this, anything can, all right guys, this is the 1970s. You keep talking about the Grunge era. How did we get from the 1970s to the Grunge era or why didn't we get there quicker basically? And one of the reasons is this guy named Tom Bache,

he's from Connecticut, he has sort of a, sounds like sort of a hippy-dippy back story through the 1960s, working all kinds of crazy jobs, but was like a super bright guy, a mathematician and a musician. Eventually got, you know, real grown-up type jobs, like help NASA make their navigation systems working with a company called Intermetrics. And in the early 90s, landed at a British tech company called Pintika. And this thing all came together really in the thing that we all knew in the 90s because of advertising. They had a product Pintika did called the MIM, capital MIME in circuit emulator.

And there was Boucher was tasked to designing an ad for this thing. So he said, hey, let's put a real mime in this advertisement. It's all very serendipitous because this mime that they hired, it's either Lab or Labby, L-A-B-B-E, shows up on set. It turns out that Lab was one of those stereo photography enthusiasts that still had those, you know, dual-inced stereo cameras. He happened to bring this thing in on the set,

and Bache was like, oh, M-G, what is that thing? And just was like, it sounds like was just instantly sort of taken with his idea. Yeah, he said it was the most compelling optical illusion I'd ever seen. There you have it, in his own words. So what he did, he said, okay, I really appreciate your help here, so I'm going to keep going with this MyMad, but I'm also going to try to make another ad using one of these auto-stereograms. And he did. He made one that had the hidden message M700, which was a version of their in circuit emulator that

is company made. Which, who knows what that is, I even tried to figure it out. So the best I could see is that it's a, like, rather than using your computer to figure out if a circuit, like a microprocessor or a circuit board works. This thing emulates either your computer or a circuit board so that you can find individual bugs and fix them. That's the best I could come up with. It's still very confusing, but that's that. Yeah.

And just so as a listener, you're not confused, that has nothing to do with what happened. It was just a product that could have been a widget or whatever. Definitely. But the idea was it was another ad that he actually used the technology to make a auto-stereogram for this ad. And this ad was so, it made such an impression on people, that it made it out of the pages of embedded systems engineering magazine the pages of embedded systems engineering magazine into something of like the general corporate culture and all of a sudden had his desk at Penteca but Shay starts getting faxes from people saying, hey can you make me and my

company one of those those really neat ads that you made. And he ended up kind of creating like a little mini-side job for himself, creating custom auto-stereograms for people who faxed them and asked for them. Yeah, he was no artist though. So very smartly in 1991, he hooked up with a woman named Sherry Smith, who was an artist of freelancer and I think was also a computer graphics person. And so he said, you're perfect, you're an artist and you know, computer graphics. So you can kick this thing up a notch and basically make images that are a little more interesting to look at. But it was still sort of an advertising thing because they made

one for American Airlines for their InFlight magazine. It was really popular and apparently for a while at least they would give away a bottle of champagne. I would think a glass, but I guess a bottle of champagne to the first person on the flight who could find the image and say what it was. Of course it was an airplane. But after the American Airlines ad thing, Bichet was like, wait a minute,

like people are going nuts for this and ads, but I think like people are going so crazy for this, I think we could just sell these somehow. Right, take his job for making these for other companies and just make them and sell them directly to the public. And he actually started out doing mail order. He realized he was on to something because he started doing mail order in order to try to kick off a fad

that he could then go in license to other people or partner with a big company and make himself that much more desirable. He really approached this in a smart way. A kick starter of the time probably was mail order. Exactly. Yeah, that's a really great analogy. And he created a company where either he created it or he already had it and repurposed it.

N-period E-period thing, enterprises. Very clever. Very, very clever. Anything? Yep. And he, get it everyone. He, just a 100% just to make sure instead of N-period E-period, what you're really saying is a and y thing

Anything for anything in our prices right so anything and period e-period theme Enterprises partnered with a Japanese company called tenio and tenio was a magic trick maker They still are as far as I can tell and they maker. They still are as far as I can tell. And they said this actually is amazing and we think our friends in Japan are going to go crazy for it and they licensed it and started publishing books based on the magic eye. What would come to be no magic eye as magic eye? And apparently it was the Tenio company that said, let's call it magic eye because the name you have for is stupid. I disagree. They call it Magic Eye because like you said, they were a magic trick company and had a line of magic, this magic that. But I think Bashay's original name, Stereo's

hyphen, or I guess comma, the amazing 3D gaze toys. Well, you have to spell it out. Well, S-T-A-R-E, Stair, Stereo's. I kind of like that. I think it's catchy. You forgot the hyphens. No. S-T-A-R-E, hyphens, O-S. Right.

You know who would love this bache guy as Jonathan Strickland? Yeah, probably. He's a punny type. So, I think Strickland would be like, you're my kind of guy, for sure. I think you should tell everyone though the great, great name of or rather the great translated name of the the first book that they put out in Japan of these. So thank you for that. It's called Miro Miro Mega Yaka Naru Magikai, which means translated. Your eyesight gets better and better in a very short rate of time. Colin Magikai.

site gets better and better in a very short rate of time. Colin Magikai. That's so good. And it was a hit, apparently. It was a best seller very quickly. I think they started, I read, they started selling them on street corners and then very quickly after that, the first printing ran out and they made another huge run and that sold out and it was just a hit in Japan. And it's interesting. It went from America to Japan

and then back to America where it really kind of blew up. Yeah, I guess Bishay didn't have, from what I could tell, he was partnered in Japan, but I guess still had the rights to do it in the United States. Even though as we'll see, he didn't own this idea, like no one did,

because other people came along later, it wasn't like a specific technology you could patent or anything. But he was the first person in the US it looks like to bring it over here, and partner with a guy named Bob Salitzky, who was a former colleague at Pintika, and it sounds like Salitzky was a guy who just made a more robust computer program

to automate the stuff to make it easier to come up with different images. And then also colorize it. So they were previously black and white, and all of a sudden you could do these things in color, which made them look sharper evidently. They hooked up with a licensing agent and they mark Gregorak who said, hey, this thing, like we give license to the crowd out of this, personally, what we got to do is get in a book, which they did in 1993. And that

was that very first, what ended up being super popular, magic eye book. Yeah, I mean, think about how Sarah and is it is starting with ron lab and then all of the people he met along the way who ended up making this the fad that it became it he really lucked out he fell backwards into something really interesting um but he um they released a bunch of books but while the first magic i book in the united states was still fresh on the best seller list they released a second one and that quickly joined the first one on the bestseller list. America just went nuts for these things.

One reason it went nuts is because there was a certain measure of superiority that you could hold over people who couldn't do it. Like, there were people out there, including me who just couldn't do it. And you just get so mad and frustrated and and people who could do it found that really satisfying I've always suspected. Yeah, it took me a while. It wasn't like I instantaneously got it, but I eventually did.

And that was kind of the joke in mall rats. I don't know if you ever saw that movie. I didn't. But it was, you know, the Kevin Smith movie. I guess right after clerks and Ethan Supply, like I said, would stare and stare at it and people were making fun of him and like there's one scene, like these two little kids came up and like got it right away and he just gets more and more frustrated. So I think that's for that.

Yeah, that's sort of playing into what you were talking about with just like feeling like a dummy if you couldn't get it. Yeah, and it definitely was a thing. I read, you know, a number of like kind of retrospectives about it. Most of them were from people who couldn't get it and they still seem slightly better. They still can't get it. 30 years on or whatever. It was enormous, not just at mall kiosks, but in books, there is a comic strip that's still around that you can license through UPI if you want. It showed up on Honeynut Cheerios boxes.

There were postcards. Other companies came a call and said, hey, we want you to make some of these for us, like Disney, I think CBS had them do something for like one of their internal sales booklets. It just started showing up everywhere. And I think the cream of the crop of like additional stuff that came out of this was a book

that Bichet put together, a magic eye book for Christmas, called, Do You See What I See? And that just presses. Yeah, that's good. I couldn't find one. I found a Christmas themed one, but I don't think it was from the Do You See What I See book. Yeah, that was disappointing. It was a little bit.

So, Bichet basically said in 1994, in one year, he estimates that they raked in between 200 and a quarter of a million bucks. Or sorry, a quarter of a billion, billion dollars, 200 and 250 million. Yeah, and that was, I think the peak year, 93 or 94 was. It was huge. All right, so, uh, Bache is going strong early 90s. Like I said, no one owned this idea. It's not a particular technology.

So people started jumping on board and doing their own. And the main standout to me I think is Are the guys who if you saw them at the mall? He asks you probably saw the version from a company called Hallusion art prints and art prints emphensis on art, I think Yeah, and so these guys Paul Heber Who's a aerospace engineer and a software engineer named Mike Bellinsky They were turned on by these things too, and they said,

hey, this is pretty great. We're two smart guys. We can build our own computer program and algorithm to make these things ourselves, and they started making these posters in 92, and those were the halusion art prints that you would most likely, those are the ones, like I said, that you were seeing it at the kiosk for about 20 to 25 bucks. These guys were printing these things for a quarter, even with, like, if they're wholesaling these things

to the kiosks, they're still making some pretty good dough off of that kind of market. Maybe 10 bucks, something like that, off a poster. Yeah, toss them a quarter, that's a good return. Heck yeah, it is. And they started churning these things out. But like I said, there's an emphasis on art prints. Like they kind of saw theirs as it was different. It was distinguished from the other ones because this, they were just so well made. The problem is, is people are like,

that's great. I can still get the same effect from a similar one from one of your competitors for $5 at Spencer's, rather than $25 at your admittedly very charming kiosk. I'm going to go with the $5 one and so they set themselves up for some pretty serious competition out of the gate. Yeah, big time and there are all kinds of people pumping these things out. But like you said, you go to the kiosk, you get your ears pierced. Sure. By a top quality He said, you go to the kiosk, you get your ears pierced. Sure. By a top quality. 17-year-old?

25-year-old. 25-year-old. Excuse me. I don't know. I meant purchase a top quality poster. Okay. But yeah, you're also getting your ear pierced by a top quality 70. It clears.

Is that piercing pogo to our glares or something? Yeah. Yeah. So, Bache, their company started to fade a little bit because of the competition. And he thought, like, when he was interviewed in 94 by Inc. Magazine, he thought this was like, hey, this is the beginning. We're going to be huge. His literal quote was talking about being a Disney of the 21st century and like making

it into a big multi-media company and then many years later in like the late 2016 or 2017 He Reflected back and said well as it turns out maybe that was just my 15 minutes And it wasn't that much fun. It was really exhausting He ended up selling his majority stake and in anything to Smith and another one of the employees there who renamed it Magic Eye.

And Smith, Sherry Smith, still owns the company today. Yeah, that original graphic art is the first partnered with. It's just pretty cool. I think that's great. I bet they still make some dough off of this. Yeah. Can you imagine if today, you tell your friend, I'm going to anything enterprises this summer and they would say world or land. Yeah.

This doesn't quite have that ring, you know. No, it doesn't. So, yeah, that FAD, RAN, it's course. Even during the heat of it, everybody but Bishay was well aware, this is a FAD. And he knew, but he was hoping beyond hope that he could turn it in and parlay it into something else, right? Yeah. But as much as the rest of the world kind of moved on from stereograms, they proved to be a really useful training technique for people whose eyes don't align properly because of poor muscular development, people with

extrabiscuits in particular. Yeah, they'll do like these little exercises, they'll give you these exercises to do, and it's almost like a workout for your eyeballs to build that muscle back up. Yeah, exactly. Apparently, there's a critical window when you're young. I think up to about three, maybe four, where your brain learns to put together the two different pictures that your eyes are giving it into one cohesive whole. And if your eyes aren't aligned properly, or there's another condition where one eye is way more dominant than the other, your brain just disregards the picture from the non-dominant or non-aligned

eye and just relies on the dominant or, you know, straight eye. And you don't see in depth, you just have a monocular vision. You're getting information from both eyes, they both work just fine, but your brain's just disregarding one. And so you're what's called stereobline. And they can correct that through surgery, but after surgery, they start showing you magic eye posters to train yourself. Yeah, Ruby had something, it wasn't exactly this, but she has always had like, when she's really tired, one of her eyes can go wonky.

That's so cute. It is, and when she was a little, she wore a patch for a little while, and then we've kept taking her to the eye the eye doctor all these years and they finally like you know it's fine like she's she's basically corrected it. It's still happened sometimes when she's super tired and I'll just say I'll say really you know snap your eyes together until go and she can do it on purpose so she kind of learned learned how to control it. That's pretty cute. Yeah, it's interesting. So if you wanted to make a magic eye puzzle, there's just a few things you need to know.

Actually, you don't really need to know anything about it because today there's so many free, like stereo, Graham, building building software available. You need to know how to type the word sailboat. Pretty much. As a matter of fact, I was looking on how to make a stereo gram. I found an instructables article,

and I opened it up, said eight steps to making a stereo gram or auto stereo gram image. Step one was download a stereo gram maker program. Very key. Yeah, exactly. But what you're doing is, I'd say we just kind of talk about how they work real quick, okay? Before we start. Yeah, I still don't quite get it. I mean, I kind of know how you can see one, but I still don't quite get how they're made. Oh, I don't either. Oh, so you mean how? Okay. I don't actually. There's so you mean how? I don't actually.

There's a little bit that I kind of understand. But from what I gather, you take your image and you make it separately. So when you're looking at a magic eye poster, there's usually not much detail, especially in the ones from the 90s. It's a star, it's a ball. I think it's a dragon kind of thing. It's just an outline, a silhouette, and they've gotten way more sophisticated since then. To, I saw one today that was a squirrel, and you could see the pupil in the squirrel's eye, like it was really sophisticated. They've gotten really good at it, but what they do, whether it's

primitive or really sophisticated, they're taking that image, making a it, but what they do, whether it's primitive or really sophisticated, they're taking that image, making a silhouette, but they're giving the silhouette depth using grayscale. So the lighter the gray color shading, there is to the silhouette, the closer it is to you, the darker it is, the further away it is. Just like you wouldn't, like a charcoal drawing of something, right? Except there's nothing in the middle. And then the computer program takes that computer-generated image and it assigns different values depending on how light or dark along the gray scale each pixel

is. And that's how much it gets displaced. So the lighter it is, the further away it gets displaced, the more it's going to pop out towards you, which indicates that this part of the picture is in the foreground, it's closer to you than say the romp of the squirrel. Yeah, so the white parts would be closer, the dark parts would appear more distant, and that creates the depth. But then you still have to have that repeating pattern laid out over the top of it. And that's basically it. You put that repeating pattern on top in these vertical strips or rather a computer does.

And then that program just translates the shades of those pixels onto that depth map and via magic, it all comes together, magic in programming. It's neat. And when I say sophisticated, I mean it, I saw in the day, I'm really sad I didn't send it to you, I meant to. But it is basically a coral reef scene with different, you can tell the different kinds of fish, like there's different clownfish closer in the foreground.

There's like trigger fish in the background, like there's a middle ground to the whole thing, like that's how good they've gotten. And like I was saying initially, when you see it it and you really see it, you can start looking around inside the image. It's just so amazing. Just look up, I think I searched sophisticated stereograms or magic eye or something like that and it brought up some really good ones. Yeah, it's, and what you mentioned earlier about

like the fact that you couldn't see him for so long, you can only have this feeling once, which is not ever being able to see one to finally seeing your first one. And when that picture jumps out from the poster, the very first time, it is like, it's a thrill, you're like, I finally got it. I see what you mean, because there's also this idea,

which of course isn't true, but I remember when they first came around that I thought it was like, some people thought it was like a snipe hunt. Right, yeah. There is no picture and it's just a way you fool your friends and is staring at a thing for an hour. So when you finally have it jump out and it's proven to you, it's a pretty remarkable feeling. It is.

And there were a couple over the last day or so where I was like, wait a minute, is this surely somebody out there has done that? It's just for fun. Just for fun. But yeah, the whole thing wasn't just a big in joke. I'm sure some people thought that for real. Yeah. So the trick that you can, there's a few tricks.

One is the one I mentioned earlier is like, if it's not a poster and it's a piece of paper you can hold, hold it very close to your nose where you can't even really focus on it and very slowly pull it away, but try and keep your, try not to focus on it still. Right. Some, many of them will have two little objects, like two dots above the whole thing, and they say, like, stare at those and unfocus until you see three of them. I wasn't able to do that. I, I'm not able to do that either. Maybe I didn't try long enough, but I always just basically, once I did the nose trick, and you have sort of taught your eye, like I said, you can just sort of get it

by just sort of un-focusing in the middle distance. Right. Yeah, that's the way that I do it. Just relax the eyes and let it come. You just gotta be patient. Gotta be patient. I guess that's it. I think basically everybody should go out

and start looking at auto-stereograms, huh? Yeah, they're not a joke. No, and their really neat. Images are really there. The first time, like you were saying, start looking at auto stereo grams huh? Yeah, they're not a joke. Nope. They're really neat. Images are really there. Yeah. The first time like you're saying, you see one, pyro techniques go off and the final countdown starts playing.

It's triumphant. It's pretty well. You always had the final count down playing. So that's probably what that was. Yes, I do. You got anything else? I got nothing else. All right, everybody.

That means of course it's time for listener mail. So, my friend, I'm just gonna pick one at random. And when I say randomly select, I mean randomly select from the large pool of people who wrote in about your mask. No. Can we talk about this? I guess. I did not see this one. If you remember from the short stuff episode recently on Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion,

I even committed you on the show for being brave enough to try public math again. And apparently didn't get it right again. Is that really something to write to anybody though? I don't know. Is it no? Let me see here. Let's go with Jake. I can burger. Hey guys I haven't laughed out loud to myself in a while, but hearing Chuck Complement's Josh bravery with the tempting live math really hit the spot I'm sure you get a lot of emails, but for Celsius to Fahrenheit you add the 32 after the multiplication, not before,

and I always treat 1.8 as the fraction 9th, 9th this because 5 is easy to deal with. So for instance, for 21, I would use 20 plus 1 because I use the fact that 20 is easily divided by 5 to my advantage. So, oh, jeez, now I don't understand any of this. So, blah, blah, blah, math stuff. Now add the 32. They give it with 36, so 36 plus 32 is 68. And don't forget about the plus 1 from earlier, every 1 degree Celsius is 1.8. So, 68 plus 1.8 would be 69.8 as the optimal butterfly temperature.

Yeah, I like my version better even though it produces incorrect results. I mean, I wouldn't even have tried it, so hats off to you for that. Thank you. Thank you for still commending me. And thank you to who? That was just Jake and let's say all the others. Jake at all, I appreciate you guys for correcting me. Thank you for that. It's been a great day.

Oh no. If you want to get in touch with us like Jake at all, did you can send us an email. Just stuff podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stephe should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, this is Annie.

And Samantha. And we are the host of Stuff Mom Never Told You, an intersectional feminist podcast tackling everything and anything. And now we have a book that digs into issues that impact so many of us and why they are so important to fight for. For example, what was the Pantsuit Revolution? What's the future of abortion? This book answers all of those questions and more, giving historical context for why they

matter to all of us now. Steffon Never Told You's Affeminist past, present, and future comes out August 29th. Pre-order where books are sold or get yours at stuffyshedreadbooks.com.