July 20, 2023 • 47 mins
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!
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, we're going on tour and you can come
out and see us in Orlando on August twelfth, Nashville
on September sixth, and we're gonna wrap it all up
on September ninth in our hometown of Atlanta, GA.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
That's right, And these are the last shows of the year.
This has been a really good show this year. We're
super excited about it, and this is going to be
your only chance to be in the theater with us,
and you know, like fifteen sixteen hundred of your closest pals.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
So go to stuff youshould know dot com and check
out our tour page for links and information, and you
can also go to link tree slash sysk for the
same stuff. We'll see you guys this August and September.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. 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.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Could meet youa you thought I wasn't real? All you
need her lazy eyes.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
That's well, no, actually it doesn't work if you have
lazy eye.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
I know that's the opposite.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
We'll get to that later.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
I would love to see Jerry in in a Magic
I poster popping out in my room.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
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 do it.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
You could at the very least a more capable and
skilled stuff you should know, listener, probably could.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
I'll just keep talking about it.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
There you go.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
That's what we're talking about.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Though.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
If you are a person of a certain age, and
you were either like a teenager or up probably in
the nineteen nineties early nineteen nineties, yep, then you probably,
at some point, much like Ethan Suppley in the movie
Mall Rats, would stand somewhere in a shopping mall at
(01:55):
a wooden kiosk, staring at a poster, waiting for that
shark or that sale to come out from the background
of that poster. Yeah, the hidden, the hidden trick.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
I tried it so many times, and I think maybe
one out of fifty I was able. Oh yeah, I
was not good at it, but I have to say Chuck.
After researching it yesterday and today, my eye muscles have
never been in better shape than they are right now.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Did you try looking at them again?
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Yes, I've been popping and locking and like just I'll
be like here, give it to me, bam, I'll see
that one. Oh, let's see another one.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Actually, I've got it, Yes, I did.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
It's really cool. Yeah. I got to that point too,
to where like at first I would do the trick
where you 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 once you sort of contrain yourself, then
you can just sort of look at it like you said,
(03:09):
and you know, the little trick with your eyes, and
then there's that polar bear or whatever.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Yeah, but I should say it's been it's been brought
to our attention. I guess ever since the Millie Vanilli
episode that even like that kind of definition is not
necessarily enough for some of our listeners. So I feel like, no,
I think we should go a little further. If you've
never seen a magic eye poster or you know generically
called the stereogram, what we're talking about is a a strange,
(03:38):
seemingly random pattern of different colors almost splattered across a poster,
and that if you relax your eyes is a certain
way so that you focus as if you're looking beyond.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
The poster, like right through it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Hm, in some sort of magic scientific way that will explain,
sort of a three dimensional image suddenly forms. You suddenly
see a three D image that you cannot see if
you're if you're not looking at it the right way. Yeah,
when you do see it, there's it's almost inevitable you're
gonna say wow, oh, gosh or something like that. It's
(04:16):
thrilling every single time it is.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
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
nineteen nineties with these magic eye posters. That were you know,
they were real fad and we'll get to that. You know,
they sold a lot of those things in a short
(04:40):
amount of time. But it goes all the way back
to the early scientists of the world trying to figure
out how in the world when you have two eyeballs
that are spaced about sixty something millimeters apart. You know,
if they're spaced apart, they're gonna be seeing things f
from a slightly different perspective. And how in the world
(05:02):
do we do that and come up with like a
solid focus on things?
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Yeah, I mean I had never really thought about it before,
but binocular vision is what you're talking about. And 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.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
The world, Yeah, very lightly from one another. Right.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
What It turns out that if we did do that,
we probably wouldn't be able to see with depth perception.
It's very crazy kind of It's called stereopsis 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
(05:44):
and richness and uh, maybe even a little kindness depending
on what you're looking at.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
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 Ptolemy,
who talked about quite a bit. Yeah, second century Roman astronomer.
And this is one of sort of the early ideas
that were was put forward. And you know, they, as
as with all things sort of science, they put forward
(06:12):
some ideas that aren't quite right and they're refined over
the years until they get to the reality of it.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
This is an ain't quite right one.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Yeah, ain't quite right because told me he thought that
your eyes sent out raise basically visual rays that hid
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 that the eyeball rays will converge on
an object. And when they converge on that object, that's
(06:39):
when you can see something in focus, basically, and if.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
They converge in it too much, they burn it to
a cinder. Excellently, he had it, he picked up there's
two things. He had it backwards. We're actually accepting rays
rather than shooting him out, so he's kind of getting there.
And then he noticed that our two eyes create an
that's our focus. It can be wide narrow, depending on
(07:04):
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 onto something, but he didn't. He who wasn't able
to really put two and two together, and then he
died and that was it for him.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
I think that's great, right.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Yes, And so his idea was that we could we
had some sort of sense that we was so involuntary
we weren't even aware of it, and that's how we
knew its true. Yeah, for sure, but still not quite right.
There about six hundred years later, Kepler and Descartes kind
of picked up on something similar, and they said, rather
than being able to sense the degree of convergence that
(08:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Yeah, Descartes said, like googly eyes, you know exactly.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
And so like it was just wrong, wrong, wrong. Finally,
in the eighteen thirties, an Englishman stepped up. His name
was Sir Charles Wheatstone. Yeah, 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
(08:48):
one single image with depth is actually from well take
a chuck.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Well, you know what's funny is in my notes I had.
Wheatstone says, quote, I got this nice exactly what you said.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
It's simpatico.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
What were you setting me up for?
Speaker 1 (09:06):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Well, he had an invention. Can I just describe that
at least? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (09:11):
The stereoscope.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
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 three D 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
(09:35):
and in the center you put your eyes up to
you know, what looks like a little viewmaster or a
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
(09:58):
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 thumbholes that you hold. It's very elegantly a little
steampunk looking thing.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
It definitely is.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
That's really that's key.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Right.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Right. Yes.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
The distinction here, Chuck, and this is where Wheatstone like
really laid the foundation for understanding binocular vision is that
each of those pictures has to be slightly different in perspective.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
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
those slight, slight differences in 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
(11:16):
it senses depth, those differences in perspective or angle that
each eye is feeding the brain as an image.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Yeah. And if you're thinking this sounds like the little
viewmaster that you had when you were a kid, that's
exactly what it is, same exact thing.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
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 this stereoscope did the
same thing. It was a big clunky thing, the steampunk version,
and then it got increasingly smaller and easier to handle
and more handy, although it was much less revolutionary than
(11:54):
the computer.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yeah, they made it like, they made it more handheld.
Those in particular, there was in the eighteen forties there
was a Scottish physicist who will be pretty prominent in
this whole story named David Brewster, Sir David Brewster, and
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
(12:18):
VR headset basically.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Yeah, like many binoculars with a slide yeah, coming out
of it that you use for focus.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
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 in 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.
(12:46):
There were a couple of big ones. It was one
of the nineteen nineties and one in the mid nineteenth century.
Queen Victoria went nuts for this thing in eighteen fifty
one at the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, and all
of a sudden, people just wanted these things to play
with and look through and marvel at. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Right from the eighteen fifties to the nineteen thirties 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 amused
yourself with them. The fact that there were companies that
were producing hundreds of thousands or millions of different stereoscopic
(13:24):
images for you 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 congressmen back east that there actually
(13:48):
was an amazing wilderness out there that should that's worth preserved. Yeah, exactly.
It really made it pop. In other words, they also
very quickly started making porn with it. Everything that you
would imagine people doing when they figured out how to
make pictures that really stand out with depth, Yeah you did.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
They were like, these are fantastic, but what's better than
a landscape? Ladies' ankles? Pretty much the 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 said about eye with the
part and those were around for a while, and there
(14:28):
are 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 nineties. But in the United States,
while all this was going on, American surgeon Oliver Wendelholmes
senior papa of Oliver Wendelholmes Junior of the spring Court fame,
(14:49):
he's invented one in the United States and he's like,
you know what, this thing's so great, I'm not even
going to 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
her anything, right, and people, I think he's the one
that coined the term stereograph, and then the word stereogram
(15:10):
kind of became the go to for these images.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
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'd use.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
All right, I think that's a robust fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Yeah, all of the nineteenth century stereogram viewers say bully, bully, bully.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
That's right, bully in three D. So we'll be back
to talk about the next development, which was the auto
stereogram right after this.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
If you want to know then you're in luck. Just
listen to joshcher seffus no.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Stuffus, no, all right, check. Now we finally get to
this stuff where I'm fascinated. Yeah, just riveted, right because
it's it's enough that our friends Wheatstone and Brewster contributed
(16:20):
the foundation to our understanding of binocular vision. But along
came in I think the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Boy, that sounds like a craft cocktail bar, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Bruce Wheatstone Andrews like, you have to have the armband
or else you can't get employed.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
There. I just got really thirsty. Sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
There was a scientist a neuroscientist named Bella. ULA's had
tip to Chuck for that one who ran the Sensory
and Perceptual Processes department at AT and T Bell Labs. Again,
I think, I said in the fifties, and ULA's was,
I guess kind of focused on visual perception and figure
(17:00):
something out. They just like just in the same way
that that Wheatstone's invention kind of led to this neat
in this.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Neat party toy toy.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yeah, ULA's invention kind of did the same thing, but
neither one of them were trying to create an amusement.
They were they were creating a way to prove a
hypothesis that they were interested in. And what he did
was come up with the random dot stereogram.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Yeah, so this is uh, 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 picked a part of it and decide on
like maybe a shape or something. So within that that square,
you'll say, all right, well, I'm gonna select a circle
(17:47):
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 we were talking about, that slight, slight difference
of perspective. Yeah, and then when you put these two
squares side by side, and when you look at these
(18:08):
two squares, you can look at it through a stereoscope
if you have one. But the key here is is
that he would prove 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 twenty twenty three with future podcaster Josh Clark,
where you unFocus your eyes and then those circles appear
(18:28):
to sort of separate from the background.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
And Youlss 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 and slightly different perspectives because their
eyes are separated just ever so slightly, it compares basically
(19:05):
pixel for pixel each of the 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 stereogram showed that what your
(19:27):
eye is doing is taking those two 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
(19:49):
in the center. Right, Yeah, 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 in showing
just exactly how our brain makes binocular vision into depth perception.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Right, So we're inching closer to the nineties and that
singular poster or coffee table book image that we all knew,
but it came to us in the nineteen seventies thanks
to a student of u Less's named Christopher Tyler, who
was a neuroscientist and he basically said, you know what,
(20:30):
we don't even need the two pictures. Everybody like you're
doing pretty good, but what if, like 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 here? Then it was Brewster who
(20:53):
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 just almost like white noise on paper.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
Yeah, And so they did away with all the crud,
those extra two images that still remain when that third
when they come together and form that illusory third image
in the middle. Yeah, so that you just see something
as you normally would see it. But if you adjust
your eyes just the right way, then that three D
image is going to come out. And now we finally
arrive in the nineteen seventies at the auto stereogram is
(21:36):
what they called it, which became better known eventually as
the Magic Eye poster.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Right, So, if you're listening to this and you're thinking,
all right, guys, this is the nineteen seventies. You keep
talking about the grunge era. How did we get from
the nineteen seventies to the grunge era or why didn't
we get there quicker? Basically? And one of the reasons
is this guy named Tom Shay. He's from Connecticut. He
has sort of a sounds like, sort of a hippie
(22:04):
dippy backstory through the nineteen sixties, working all kinds of
crazy jobs, but was like a super bright guy, a
mathematician and musician. Eventually got you know, real grown up
type jobs like helped NASA make their navigation systems, working
with a company called Intermetrics, and in the early nineties
(22:24):
landed at a British tech company called Pentica. And this
thing all came together really in the in the thing
that we all knew in love in the nineties because
of advertising. They had a product Pentica did called the
mime Capital mim in Circuit Emulator, and they were Boushet
was tasked to designing an ad for this thing, and
(22:47):
so he said, Hey, let's put a real mime in
this advertisement. It's all very serendipitous because it really is
this mime that they hired. It's either Lab or labby
Labb shows up on set and it turns out that
Lab was one of those stereo photography enthusiasts that still
had those you know, dual lensed stereo cameras. He happened
(23:10):
to bring this thing in on the set and Bashet
was like, OMG, what is that thing and just was like,
sounds like it was just instantly sort of taken with
his idea.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Yeah, he said it was the most compelling optical illusion
I'd ever seen.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
There you haven't in his own words.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
So what he did he said, Okay, I really appreciate
your help here, so I'm going to keep going with
this mime ad, 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
M seven hundred, which was a version of their in
circuit emulator that his company made.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Which who knows what that is. I even tried to
figure it out.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
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 microprocess 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
(24:12):
the best I could come up with. It's still very confusing,
but that's yeah, that's that.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
And just so as a listener, you're not confused. That
has nothing to do with what happened. It was just
a product. It 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 autostereogram for this ad.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
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 into something of like the
general corporate culture. And all of a sudden, at his
desk at Pentica, but Shea starts getting faxes from people saying, Hey,
(24:57):
can you make me and my company one of 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 him and
asked for him.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Yeah, he was no artist, though, so very smartly. In
nineteen ninety one, he hooked up with a woman named
Sherry Smith, who was an artist, a 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
(25:36):
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
in flight magazine that 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
(25:57):
flight who could find the image and say what it was.
Of course it was an airplane. But after the American
Airlines ad thing, Boshe was like, wait a minute, like
people are going nuts for this in ads. But I think,
like people are going so crazy for this, I think
we could just sell these somehow, right.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Take his job for making these four other companies and
just make them and sell them directly to the public.
And he actually started out doing mail order. He was
he realized he was onto something because he started doing
mail order in order to try to kick off a
fad that he could then go and license to other
people or partner with a big company and make himself
(26:34):
that much more desirable. He really approached this in a
smart way.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
A kickstarter of the time probably was mail order exactly.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Yeah, that's a really great analogy. And he created a
company or either he created it or he already had
it and repurposed it. N period e period thing enterprises.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Very clever, very very clever anything. Yeah, and he dieted everyone.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
He just one hundred percent, just to make sure instead
of N period e period what you're really saying is
a and y.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Thing anything anything.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
We're anything enterprises, right, so anything N period e period
Thing Enterprises partnered with a Japanese company called Tenyoh and
Tenya was a magic trick 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
(27:30):
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 ten Year company that said,
let's call it Magic Eye because the name you have
for it is stupid.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
I disagree. They called 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 Boushat's original
name stereos hyphen or I guess Kama the Amazing Thing
gays toys, So you have to spell it out well,
S T A R E stare stereos. I kind of
(28:06):
like that. I think it's catchy. You forgot the hyphens, No,
S T A R E hyphen e hyphens right.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
You know who would love this bishet? Guys Jonathan Strickland. Yeah,
he's a puny type, so I think Strickland would be like,
You're my kind of guy, for sure.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
I think you should tell everyone, though, the great great
name of or rather the great translated name of the
first book that they put out in Japan of these.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
So thank you for that. It's called Muru Muru Mega
yaka Nadu MAGICI.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Which means translated.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Your eyesight gets better and better in a very short
rate of time. Colon MAGICI.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
That's so good, and it was a hit.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Apparently it was the 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 print,
the first printing ran out and they they made an
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
(29:09):
really kind of blew up.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Yeah, I guess Bashad 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, like he didn't own this idea like
no one did, because other people came along later. It
was it wasn't like a specific technology you could patent
or anything. But he was the first person in the US,
(29:33):
it looks like, to bring it over here and partner
with a guy named Bob Slitski who was a former
colleague at Pentica. And it sounds like Slitski 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
(29:55):
were previously black and white, and all of a sudden
you could do these things which made them look sharper. Evidently,
they hooked up with a licensing agent named Mark Gregorrek
who said, hey, this thing like we could license the
cred out of this person. Thing we had to do
was get in a book, which they did in nineteen
ninety three, and that was that very first what ended
(30:17):
up being super popular Magic eyebook.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
Yeah. I mean, think about how Saren dippis 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. He really lucked out. He
fell backwards into something really interesting. But they released a
bunch of books. But while the first Magic Eyebook in
the United States was still fresh on the best seller list,
(30:42):
they released a second one and that quickly joined the
first one on the best seller list. America just went
nuts for these things.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
One reason it went nuts is because there was a
certain measure of superiority that you could hold people who.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Couldn't do it, like you'd see it.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
There were people out there, including me, you just couldn't
do it, and you just get so mad and frustrated,
and people who could do it found that really satisfying.
I've always suspected.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
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
Clerk's and Ethan Suppley, 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
(31:30):
came up and like got it right away, and he
just gets more and more frustrated.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
So he's for that.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
Yeah, and that definitely was a thing. I've read, you
know a number of like kind of retrospectives about it,
and most of them were from people who couldn't get it,
and they still seemed slightly bitter, but they still can't
get it, you know, thirty years on or whatever. But
it was. It was enormous, not just at mal kiosks,
but in books. There is a comic strip that's still
(32:01):
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 in 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,
(32:22):
and I think the cream of the crop of like
additional stuff that came out of this was a book
that Boshet put together, a magic eyebook for Christmas called
do you See What I See?
Speaker 2 (32:37):
That just presses Yeah, that's good.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
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?
Speaker 2 (32:43):
Book? That's disappointing. It was a little bit so Bishey
basically said in nineteen ninety four, in one year he
estimates that they raked in between two hundred and a
quarter of a million bucks or sorry, quarter of a
billion billion dollars and hundred and fifty million.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Yeah, and that was I think the peak here in
ninety three or ninety four was it was huge.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
All right, So Bashe is going strong. Early nineties, 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 kiosks, you probably saw the version from a
(33:31):
company called Hallusion art Prints.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
And art prints emphasis on art I think.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
Yeah. And so these guys, Paul Huber, who's an aerospace engineer,
and a software engineer named Mike Belinsky, 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 ninety two, and
(33:59):
that those were the Hallusion art prints that you would
most likely those are the ones. Like I said that
you were seeing it at the kiosk for about twenty
to twenty five bucks. These guys were printing these things
for a quarter. Even with like if they're wholesaling these
things to the kiosk, they're still making some pretty good
dough off of that. Yeah, kind of mark.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Maybe ten bucks something like that off.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
A poster awsome a quarter. It's good return.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
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 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 five
dollars at Spencer's rather than twenty five dollars at your
(34:45):
admittedly very charming Kiosk. Right, I'm gonna go with the
five dollars one. And so they set themselves up for
some pretty serious competition out of the gate.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
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 seventeen year old twenty five times. Excuse me,
Oh don't know. I meant purchase a top quality poster. Okay,
but yeah, you're also getting your ear piers by a
top quality seventeen Claire's piercing Pagoda or Claies or something.
(35:19):
So Basha their company started to fade a little bit
because of the competition, and he thought, like when he
was interviewed in ninety four by Ink 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 twenty first century and like making
(35:40):
it into a big multimedia company. And then many years later,
in like the late twenty sixteen or twenty seventeen, he
reflected back and said, well, as it turns out, maybe
that was just my fifteen minutes and it wasn't that
much fun and it was really exhausting. He ended up
selling his majority State and Anything to Smith and another
(36:03):
one of the employees there who renamed it Magic Eye
and Smith's Cherry Smith still owns the company today.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Yeah, that original graphic artist he first partnered with, which
is pretty cool. I think that's great.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
Yeah, you know, I bet they still make some dough
off of this. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Can you imagine if today we were you know, you'd
tell your friend I'm going to Anything Enterprises this summer
and then we say World or Land. Yeah, just doesn't
quite have that ring, you know, No, it doesn't. So, Yeah,
that fad ran its course. Even during the heat of it.
Everybody but Boshet was well aware this is a fad,
(36:41):
and he knew, but he was hoping beyond hope that
he could turn it 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
(37:02):
properly because of poor muscular development, people with strabismus in particular.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
Yeah, it almost they'll do like these little exercises. I'll
give you these exercises to do, and it's almost like
a workout for your eyeball, right, to build that muscle
back up.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
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
it's eye, your eyes are giving it into one cohesive hole,
and that if your eyes aren't aligned properly, or there's
another condition where one eye is way more dominant than
(37:40):
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 monocular vision. You're getting
information from both eyes. They both work just fine, but
your brain's just disregarding one and so you you're what's
(38:00):
called stereo blind. And they can correct that through surgery.
But after surgery, they start showing you magic eye posters
to train yourself.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Yeah, Ruby had something. It wasn't exactly this, but she
has has always had like when she's really tired, one
of her eyes can go wonky. Yeah it is. And
when she was little she wore a patch for a
little while and then you know, we've kept taking her
to the to the eye doctor all these years and
they finally were like, you know, it's fine, Like she's
(38:30):
she's basically corrected it. It still happens sometimes when she's
super tired, and I'll just say, I'll say, maybe, you know,
snap your eyes together, and she go zoop and she can.
She can do it on purpose, so she kind of
learned how to control it. I guess that's pretty cute. Yeah,
it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
So if you wanted to make a magic eye puzzle, Uh,
there's just a few things you need to know. Actually
you do. You don't really need to know anything about
it because today there's so many free like like stereogram
building software available.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
You know, you need to know how to type the
word sailboat pretty much.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
As a matter of fact, I was looking on how
to make a stereogram. I found an Instructibles article and
I opened it up said eight steps to making a
stereogram or auto stereogram image. Step one was download a
stereogram maker program. Key, yeah, exactly. But what you're doing is,
(39:29):
i'd say, we just kind of talk about how they
work real quick, okay before we eat.
Speaker 3 (39:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Oh I don't either. Ohh so mean, okay, I don't.
Actually there's a little bit that I kind of understand.
But from what I gather, they you take your image
and you make it separately. Right, So when you're when
you're looking at a magic I poster, there's usually not
much detail, especially in the ones from the nineties. It's
(40:02):
a star, it's a ball, it's a 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.
Speaker 2 (40:19):
Oh wow, they've.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Gotten really good at 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 gray scale.
So the lighter the gray color shading there is to
the silhouette, the closer it is to you, the darker
it is, the further way it is. Just like you
(40:41):
wouldn't like a regular 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.
The lighter it is, the further away it gets just placed,
(41:03):
the more it's gonna pop out towards you, which indicates
that this part of the pictures in the foreground, it's
closer to you than say the rump of the squirrel.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
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, right, And I
mean that's basically you put that repeating pattern on top
and these vertical strips or rather a computer does, and
then that that program just translates the shades of those
(41:35):
pixels onto that depth map and via magic it all
comes together. Yeah, magic in program. It's neat.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
And when I say sophisticated, I mean it. I saw
it in today. 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 triggerfish in the background, Like there's a middle
ground to the whole thing. Like that's how good they've gotten.
(42:03):
And like I was saying initially, when you see it
and you really see it, you can start looking around
inside the image. It's they it's just so amazing. You
just look up, like I guess, I think I searched
sophisticated stereograms or magic eye or something like that, and
it brought up some really good ones.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
Yeah, it's uh. 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.
(42:45):
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 you know, I remember when they first came around
that I thought it was like some people thought it
was like a snipe punt, right, Yeah, there is no picture,
and it's just a way you fool your friends and
staring at a thing for an hour. So when you
finally have it jump out and it's proven to you,
(43:07):
it's a pretty remarkable feeling.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
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 for fun.
But yeah, the whole thing wasn't just a big in joke.
I'm sure some people thought that for real.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Yeah. So the trick that you can use, 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. Some many of them
(43:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:53):
Wasn't able to do that.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
I am not able to do that either, or maybe
I didn't try long enough. But I always just base
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 unfocusing in
the middle distance.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
Right, Yeah, that's the way that I do it. Just
relax the eyes and let it. Yeah, you just gotta
be patient.
Speaker 2 (44:14):
Gotta be patient.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
I guess that's it. I think basically everybody should go
out and start looking at auto stereograms. Huh.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
Yeah, they're not a joke. Nope, they're really neat images
are really there?
Speaker 1 (44:27):
Yeah, the first time, like you were saying, you see
one pyrotechnics go off and the final countdown starts playing,
it's it's triumphant.
Speaker 2 (44:36):
It's pretty well you always had the final catin I'm playing,
So that's probably what that was.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Yes, I do you got anything else?
Speaker 2 (44:42):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 1 (44:43):
All right?
Speaker 2 (44:43):
Everybody?
Speaker 1 (44:44):
That means, of course, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (44:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
Oh, we talk about this. I guess I did not
see this one.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
If you remember from the short stuff episode recently on
Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion, I even commended you on the
show for being brave enough to try public math again
and apparently didn't get it right again.
Speaker 1 (45:20):
Is it really a surprise to anybody though?
Speaker 2 (45:23):
I don't know, is it?
Speaker 3 (45:25):
No?
Speaker 2 (45:27):
Let me see here. Let's go with Jake Eichenberger. Hey, guys,
I haven't laughed out loud to myself in a while,
but hearing Chuck compliments Josh Bravery with attempting live math
really hit the spot. I'm sure you get a lot
of emails. But for Celsius to Fahrenheit, you add the
thirty two after the multiplication, not before. And I always
(45:48):
treat one point eight as diprection nine fifths because five
is easy to deal with. So, for instance, for twenty one,
I would use twenty plus one because I use the
fact that twenty is easily to divide by five to
my advantage here. So jeez, now I don't understand any
of this, so blah blah blah math stuff. Now add
(46:10):
the thirty two they came up with thirty six, So
thirty six plus thirty two is sixty eight. And don't
forget about the plus one from earlier. Every one degree
celsius is one point eight, so sixty eight plus one
point eight would be sixty nine point eight as the
optimal butterfly temperature.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
Yeah, I like my version better, even though it produces
incorrect results.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
I mean I wouldn't even have tried it, So hats
off to you for that.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
Thank you, thank you for still commending me, and thank
you to uh who.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
That was just Jake, and let's say all the others.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
Jake at all, I appreciate you guys for correcting me.
Thank you for that. It's been a great day. If
you want to get in touch with us, like Jake
at All did, you can send us an email. Stuff
podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is
(47:02):
a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (47:04):
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, we're going on tour and you can come
out and see us in Orlando on August twelfth, Nashville
on September sixth, and we're gonna wrap it all up
on September ninth in our hometown of Atlanta, GA.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
That's right, And these are the last shows of the year.
This has been a really good show this year. We're
super excited about it, and this is going to be
your only chance to be in the theater with us,
and you know, like fifteen sixteen hundred of your closest pals.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
So go to stuff youshould know dot com and check
out our tour page for links and information, and you
can also go to link tree slash sysk for the
same stuff. We'll see you guys this August and September.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. 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.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Could meet youa you thought I wasn't real? All you
need her lazy eyes.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
That's well, no, actually it doesn't work if you have
lazy eye.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
I know that's the opposite.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
We'll get to that later.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
I would love to see Jerry in in a Magic
I poster popping out in my room.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
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 do it.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Huh.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
You could at the very least a more capable and
skilled stuff you should know, listener, probably could.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
I'll just keep talking about it.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
There you go.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
That's what we're talking about.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Though.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
If you are a person of a certain age, and
you were either like a teenager or up probably in
the nineteen nineties early nineteen nineties, yep, then you probably,
at some point, much like Ethan Suppley in the movie
Mall Rats, would stand somewhere in a shopping mall at
(01:55):
a wooden kiosk, staring at a poster, waiting for that
shark or that sale to come out from the background
of that poster. Yeah, the hidden, the hidden trick.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
I tried it so many times, and I think maybe
one out of fifty I was able. Oh yeah, I
was not good at it, but I have to say Chuck.
After researching it yesterday and today, my eye muscles have
never been in better shape than they are right now.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Did you try looking at them again?
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Yes, I've been popping and locking and like just I'll
be like here, give it to me, bam, I'll see
that one. Oh, let's see another one.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Actually, I've got it, Yes, I did.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
It's really cool. Yeah. I got to that point too,
to where like at first I would do the trick
where you 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 once you sort of contrain yourself, then
you can just sort of look at it like you said,
(03:09):
and you know, the little trick with your eyes, and
then there's that polar bear or whatever.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Yeah, but I should say it's been it's been brought
to our attention. I guess ever since the Millie Vanilli
episode that even like that kind of definition is not
necessarily enough for some of our listeners. So I feel like, no,
I think we should go a little further. If you've
never seen a magic eye poster or you know generically
called the stereogram, what we're talking about is a a strange,
(03:38):
seemingly random pattern of different colors almost splattered across a poster,
and that if you relax your eyes is a certain
way so that you focus as if you're looking beyond.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
The poster, like right through it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Hm, in some sort of magic scientific way that will explain,
sort of a three dimensional image suddenly forms. You suddenly
see a three D image that you cannot see if
you're if you're not looking at it the right way. Yeah,
when you do see it, there's it's almost inevitable you're
gonna say wow, oh, gosh or something like that. It's
(04:16):
thrilling every single time it is.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
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
nineteen nineties with these magic eye posters. That were you know,
they were real fad and we'll get to that. You know,
they sold a lot of those things in a short
(04:40):
amount of time. But it goes all the way back
to the early scientists of the world trying to figure
out how in the world when you have two eyeballs
that are spaced about sixty something millimeters apart. You know,
if they're spaced apart, they're gonna be seeing things f
from a slightly different perspective. And how in the world
(05:02):
do we do that and come up with like a
solid focus on things?
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Yeah, I mean I had never really thought about it before,
but binocular vision is what you're talking about. And 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.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
The world, Yeah, very lightly from one another. Right.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
What It turns out that if we did do that,
we probably wouldn't be able to see with depth perception.
It's very crazy kind of It's called stereopsis 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
(05:44):
and richness and uh, maybe even a little kindness depending
on what you're looking at.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
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 Ptolemy,
who talked about quite a bit. Yeah, second century Roman astronomer.
And this is one of sort of the early ideas
that were was put forward. And you know, they, as
as with all things sort of science, they put forward
(06:12):
some ideas that aren't quite right and they're refined over
the years until they get to the reality of it.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
This is an ain't quite right one.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Yeah, ain't quite right because told me he thought that
your eyes sent out raise basically visual rays that hid
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 that the eyeball rays will converge on
an object. And when they converge on that object, that's
(06:39):
when you can see something in focus, basically, and if.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
They converge in it too much, they burn it to
a cinder. Excellently, he had it, he picked up there's
two things. He had it backwards. We're actually accepting rays
rather than shooting him out, so he's kind of getting there.
And then he noticed that our two eyes create an
that's our focus. It can be wide narrow, depending on
(07:04):
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 onto something, but he didn't. He who wasn't able
to really put two and two together, and then he
died and that was it for him.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
I think that's great, right.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Yes, And so his idea was that we could we
had some sort of sense that we was so involuntary
we weren't even aware of it, and that's how we
knew its true. Yeah, for sure, but still not quite right.
There about six hundred years later, Kepler and Descartes kind
of picked up on something similar, and they said, rather
than being able to sense the degree of convergence that
(08:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Yeah, Descartes said, like googly eyes, you know exactly.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
And so like it was just wrong, wrong, wrong. Finally,
in the eighteen thirties, an Englishman stepped up. His name
was Sir Charles Wheatstone. Yeah, 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
(08:48):
one single image with depth is actually from well take
a chuck.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Well, you know what's funny is in my notes I had.
Wheatstone says, quote, I got this nice exactly what you said.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
It's simpatico.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
What were you setting me up for?
Speaker 1 (09:06):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Well, he had an invention. Can I just describe that
at least? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (09:11):
The stereoscope.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
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 three D 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
(09:35):
and in the center you put your eyes up to
you know, what looks like a little viewmaster or a
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
(09:58):
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 thumbholes that you hold. It's very elegantly a little
steampunk looking thing.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
It definitely is.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
That's really that's key.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Right.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Right. Yes.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
The distinction here, Chuck, and this is where Wheatstone like
really laid the foundation for understanding binocular vision is that
each of those pictures has to be slightly different in perspective.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
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
those slight, slight differences in 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
(11:16):
it senses depth, those differences in perspective or angle that
each eye is feeding the brain as an image.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Yeah. And if you're thinking this sounds like the little
viewmaster that you had when you were a kid, that's
exactly what it is, same exact thing.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
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 this stereoscope did the
same thing. It was a big clunky thing, the steampunk version,
and then it got increasingly smaller and easier to handle
and more handy, although it was much less revolutionary than
(11:54):
the computer.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yeah, they made it like, they made it more handheld.
Those in particular, there was in the eighteen forties there
was a Scottish physicist who will be pretty prominent in
this whole story named David Brewster, Sir David Brewster, and
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
(12:18):
VR headset basically.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Yeah, like many binoculars with a slide yeah, coming out
of it that you use for focus.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
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 in 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.
(12:46):
There were a couple of big ones. It was one
of the nineteen nineties and one in the mid nineteenth century.
Queen Victoria went nuts for this thing in eighteen fifty
one at the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, and all
of a sudden, people just wanted these things to play
with and look through and marvel at. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
Right from the eighteen fifties to the nineteen thirties 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 amused
yourself with them. The fact that there were companies that
were producing hundreds of thousands or millions of different stereoscopic
(13:24):
images for you 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 congressmen back east that there actually
(13:48):
was an amazing wilderness out there that should that's worth preserved. Yeah, exactly.
It really made it pop. In other words, they also
very quickly started making porn with it. Everything that you
would imagine people doing when they figured out how to
make pictures that really stand out with depth, Yeah you did.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
They were like, these are fantastic, but what's better than
a landscape? Ladies' ankles? Pretty much the 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 said about eye with the
part and those were around for a while, and there
(14:28):
are 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 nineties. But in the United States,
while all this was going on, American surgeon Oliver Wendelholmes
senior papa of Oliver Wendelholmes Junior of the spring Court fame,
(14:49):
he's invented one in the United States and he's like,
you know what, this thing's so great, I'm not even
going to 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
her anything, right, and people, I think he's the one
that coined the term stereograph, and then the word stereogram
(15:10):
kind of became the go to for these images.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
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'd use.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
All right, I think that's a robust fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Yeah, all of the nineteenth century stereogram viewers say bully, bully, bully.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
That's right, bully in three D. So we'll be back
to talk about the next development, which was the auto
stereogram right after this.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
If you want to know then you're in luck. Just
listen to joshcher seffus no.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Stuffus, no, all right, check. Now we finally get to
this stuff where I'm fascinated. Yeah, just riveted, right because
it's it's enough that our friends Wheatstone and Brewster contributed
(16:20):
the foundation to our understanding of binocular vision. But along
came in I think the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
Boy, that sounds like a craft cocktail bar, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Bruce Wheatstone Andrews like, you have to have the armband
or else you can't get employed.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
There. I just got really thirsty. Sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
There was a scientist a neuroscientist named Bella. ULA's had
tip to Chuck for that one who ran the Sensory
and Perceptual Processes department at AT and T Bell Labs. Again,
I think, I said in the fifties, and ULA's was,
I guess kind of focused on visual perception and figure
(17:00):
something out. They just like just in the same way
that that Wheatstone's invention kind of led to this neat
in this.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Neat party toy toy.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yeah, ULA's invention kind of did the same thing, but
neither one of them were trying to create an amusement.
They were they were creating a way to prove a
hypothesis that they were interested in. And what he did
was come up with the random dot stereogram.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Yeah, so this is uh, 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 picked a part of it and decide on
like maybe a shape or something. So within that that square,
you'll say, all right, well, I'm gonna select a circle
(17:47):
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 we were talking about, that slight, slight difference
of perspective. Yeah, and then when you put these two
squares side by side, and when you look at these
(18:08):
two squares, you can look at it through a stereoscope
if you have one. But the key here is is
that he would prove 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 twenty twenty three with future podcaster Josh Clark,
where you unFocus your eyes and then those circles appear
(18:28):
to sort of separate from the background.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
And Youlss 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 and slightly different perspectives because their
eyes are separated just ever so slightly, it compares basically
(19:05):
pixel for pixel each of the 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 stereogram showed that what your
(19:27):
eye is doing is taking those two 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
(19:49):
in the center. Right, Yeah, 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 in showing
just exactly how our brain makes binocular vision into depth perception.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Right, So we're inching closer to the nineties and that
singular poster or coffee table book image that we all knew,
but it came to us in the nineteen seventies thanks
to a student of u Less's named Christopher Tyler, who
was a neuroscientist and he basically said, you know what,
(20:30):
we don't even need the two pictures. Everybody like you're
doing pretty good, but what if, like 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 here? Then it was Brewster who
(20:53):
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 just almost like white noise on paper.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
Yeah, And so they did away with all the crud,
those extra two images that still remain when that third
when they come together and form that illusory third image
in the middle. Yeah, so that you just see something
as you normally would see it. But if you adjust
your eyes just the right way, then that three D
image is going to come out. And now we finally
arrive in the nineteen seventies at the auto stereogram is
(21:36):
what they called it, which became better known eventually as
the Magic Eye poster.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Right, So, if you're listening to this and you're thinking,
all right, guys, this is the nineteen seventies. You keep
talking about the grunge era. How did we get from
the nineteen seventies to the grunge era or why didn't
we get there quicker? Basically? And one of the reasons
is this guy named Tom Shay. He's from Connecticut. He
has sort of a sounds like, sort of a hippie
(22:04):
dippy backstory through the nineteen sixties, working all kinds of
crazy jobs, but was like a super bright guy, a
mathematician and musician. Eventually got you know, real grown up
type jobs like helped NASA make their navigation systems, working
with a company called Intermetrics, and in the early nineties
(22:24):
landed at a British tech company called Pentica. And this
thing all came together really in the in the thing
that we all knew in love in the nineties because
of advertising. They had a product Pentica did called the
mime Capital mim in Circuit Emulator, and they were Boushet
was tasked to designing an ad for this thing, and
(22:47):
so he said, Hey, let's put a real mime in
this advertisement. It's all very serendipitous because it really is
this mime that they hired. It's either Lab or labby
Labb shows up on set and it turns out that
Lab was one of those stereo photography enthusiasts that still
had those you know, dual lensed stereo cameras. He happened
(23:10):
to bring this thing in on the set and Bashet
was like, OMG, what is that thing and just was like,
sounds like it was just instantly sort of taken with
his idea.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Yeah, he said it was the most compelling optical illusion
I'd ever seen.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
There you haven't in his own words.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
So what he did he said, Okay, I really appreciate
your help here, so I'm going to keep going with
this mime ad, 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
M seven hundred, which was a version of their in
circuit emulator that his company made.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Which who knows what that is. I even tried to
figure it out.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
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 microprocess 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
(24:12):
the best I could come up with. It's still very confusing,
but that's yeah, that's that.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
And just so as a listener, you're not confused. That
has nothing to do with what happened. It was just
a product. It 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 autostereogram for this ad.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
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 into something of like the
general corporate culture. And all of a sudden, at his
desk at Pentica, but Shea starts getting faxes from people saying, Hey,
(24:57):
can you make me and my company one of 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 him and
asked for him.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Yeah, he was no artist, though, so very smartly. In
nineteen ninety one, he hooked up with a woman named
Sherry Smith, who was an artist, a 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
(25:36):
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
in flight magazine that 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
(25:57):
flight who could find the image and say what it was.
Of course it was an airplane. But after the American
Airlines ad thing, Boshe was like, wait a minute, like
people are going nuts for this in ads. But I think,
like people are going so crazy for this, I think
we could just sell these somehow, right.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Take his job for making these four other companies and
just make them and sell them directly to the public.
And he actually started out doing mail order. He was
he realized he was onto something because he started doing
mail order in order to try to kick off a
fad that he could then go and license to other
people or partner with a big company and make himself
(26:34):
that much more desirable. He really approached this in a
smart way.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
A kickstarter of the time probably was mail order exactly.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Yeah, that's a really great analogy. And he created a
company or either he created it or he already had
it and repurposed it. N period e period thing enterprises.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Very clever, very very clever anything. Yeah, and he dieted everyone.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
He just one hundred percent, just to make sure instead
of N period e period what you're really saying is
a and y.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Thing anything anything.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
We're anything enterprises, right, so anything N period e period
Thing Enterprises partnered with a Japanese company called Tenyoh and
Tenya was a magic trick 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
(27:30):
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 ten Year company that said,
let's call it Magic Eye because the name you have
for it is stupid.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
I disagree. They called 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 Boushat's original
name stereos hyphen or I guess Kama the Amazing Thing
gays toys, So you have to spell it out well,
S T A R E stare stereos. I kind of
(28:06):
like that. I think it's catchy. You forgot the hyphens, No,
S T A R E hyphen e hyphens right.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
You know who would love this bishet? Guys Jonathan Strickland. Yeah,
he's a puny type, so I think Strickland would be like,
You're my kind of guy, for sure.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
I think you should tell everyone, though, the great great
name of or rather the great translated name of the
first book that they put out in Japan of these.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
So thank you for that. It's called Muru Muru Mega
yaka Nadu MAGICI.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Which means translated.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Your eyesight gets better and better in a very short
rate of time. Colon MAGICI.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
That's so good, and it was a hit.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
Apparently it was the 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 print,
the first printing ran out and they they made an
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
(29:09):
really kind of blew up.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Yeah, I guess Bashad 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, like he didn't own this idea like
no one did, because other people came along later. It
was it wasn't like a specific technology you could patent
or anything. But he was the first person in the US,
(29:33):
it looks like, to bring it over here and partner
with a guy named Bob Slitski who was a former
colleague at Pentica. And it sounds like Slitski 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
(29:55):
were previously black and white, and all of a sudden
you could do these things which made them look sharper. Evidently,
they hooked up with a licensing agent named Mark Gregorrek
who said, hey, this thing like we could license the
cred out of this person. Thing we had to do
was get in a book, which they did in nineteen
ninety three, and that was that very first what ended
(30:17):
up being super popular Magic eyebook.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
Yeah. I mean, think about how Saren dippis 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. He really lucked out. He
fell backwards into something really interesting. But they released a
bunch of books. But while the first Magic Eyebook in
the United States was still fresh on the best seller list,
(30:42):
they released a second one and that quickly joined the
first one on the best seller list. America just went
nuts for these things.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
One reason it went nuts is because there was a
certain measure of superiority that you could hold people who.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Couldn't do it, like you'd see it.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
There were people out there, including me, you just couldn't
do it, and you just get so mad and frustrated,
and people who could do it found that really satisfying.
I've always suspected.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
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
Clerk's and Ethan Suppley, 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
(31:30):
came up and like got it right away, and he
just gets more and more frustrated.
Speaker 1 (31:34):
So he's for that.
Speaker 2 (31:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
Yeah, and that definitely was a thing. I've read, you
know a number of like kind of retrospectives about it,
and most of them were from people who couldn't get it,
and they still seemed slightly bitter, but they still can't
get it, you know, thirty years on or whatever. But
it was. It was enormous, not just at mal kiosks,
but in books. There is a comic strip that's still
(32:01):
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 in 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,
(32:22):
and I think the cream of the crop of like
additional stuff that came out of this was a book
that Boshet put together, a magic eyebook for Christmas called
do you See What I See?
Speaker 2 (32:37):
That just presses Yeah, that's good.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
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?
Speaker 2 (32:43):
Book? That's disappointing. It was a little bit so Bishey
basically said in nineteen ninety four, in one year he
estimates that they raked in between two hundred and a
quarter of a million bucks or sorry, quarter of a
billion billion dollars and hundred and fifty million.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Yeah, and that was I think the peak here in
ninety three or ninety four was it was huge.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
All right, So Bashe is going strong. Early nineties, 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 kiosks, you probably saw the version from a
(33:31):
company called Hallusion art Prints.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
And art prints emphasis on art I think.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
Yeah. And so these guys, Paul Huber, who's an aerospace engineer,
and a software engineer named Mike Belinsky, 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 ninety two, and
(33:59):
that those were the Hallusion art prints that you would
most likely those are the ones. Like I said that
you were seeing it at the kiosk for about twenty
to twenty five bucks. These guys were printing these things
for a quarter. Even with like if they're wholesaling these
things to the kiosk, they're still making some pretty good
dough off of that. Yeah, kind of mark.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Maybe ten bucks something like that off.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
A poster awsome a quarter. It's good return.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
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 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 five
dollars at Spencer's rather than twenty five dollars at your
(34:45):
admittedly very charming Kiosk. Right, I'm gonna go with the
five dollars one. And so they set themselves up for
some pretty serious competition out of the gate.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
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 seventeen year old twenty five times. Excuse me,
Oh don't know. I meant purchase a top quality poster. Okay,
but yeah, you're also getting your ear piers by a
top quality seventeen Claire's piercing Pagoda or Claies or something.
(35:19):
So Basha their company started to fade a little bit
because of the competition, and he thought, like when he
was interviewed in ninety four by Ink 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 twenty first century and like making
(35:40):
it into a big multimedia company. And then many years later,
in like the late twenty sixteen or twenty seventeen, he
reflected back and said, well, as it turns out, maybe
that was just my fifteen minutes and it wasn't that
much fun and it was really exhausting. He ended up
selling his majority State and Anything to Smith and another
(36:03):
one of the employees there who renamed it Magic Eye
and Smith's Cherry Smith still owns the company today.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Yeah, that original graphic artist he first partnered with, which
is pretty cool. I think that's great.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
Yeah, you know, I bet they still make some dough
off of this. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Can you imagine if today we were you know, you'd
tell your friend I'm going to Anything Enterprises this summer
and then we say World or Land. Yeah, just doesn't
quite have that ring, you know, No, it doesn't. So, Yeah,
that fad ran its course. Even during the heat of it.
Everybody but Boshet was well aware this is a fad,
(36:41):
and he knew, but he was hoping beyond hope that
he could turn it 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
(37:02):
properly because of poor muscular development, people with strabismus in particular.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
Yeah, it almost they'll do like these little exercises. I'll
give you these exercises to do, and it's almost like
a workout for your eyeball, right, to build that muscle
back up.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
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
it's eye, your eyes are giving it into one cohesive hole,
and that if your eyes aren't aligned properly, or there's
another condition where one eye is way more dominant than
(37:40):
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 monocular vision. You're getting
information from both eyes. They both work just fine, but
your brain's just disregarding one and so you you're what's
(38:00):
called stereo blind. And they can correct that through surgery.
But after surgery, they start showing you magic eye posters
to train yourself.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Yeah, Ruby had something. It wasn't exactly this, but she
has has always had like when she's really tired, one
of her eyes can go wonky. Yeah it is. And
when she was little she wore a patch for a
little while and then you know, we've kept taking her
to the to the eye doctor all these years and
they finally were like, you know, it's fine, Like she's
(38:30):
she's basically corrected it. It still happens sometimes when she's
super tired, and I'll just say, I'll say, maybe, you know,
snap your eyes together, and she go zoop and she can.
She can do it on purpose, so she kind of
learned how to control it. I guess that's pretty cute. Yeah,
it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
So if you wanted to make a magic eye puzzle, Uh,
there's just a few things you need to know. Actually
you do. You don't really need to know anything about
it because today there's so many free like like stereogram
building software available.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
You know, you need to know how to type the
word sailboat pretty much.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
As a matter of fact, I was looking on how
to make a stereogram. I found an Instructibles article and
I opened it up said eight steps to making a
stereogram or auto stereogram image. Step one was download a
stereogram maker program. Key, yeah, exactly. But what you're doing is,
(39:29):
i'd say, we just kind of talk about how they
work real quick, okay before we eat.
Speaker 3 (39:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
Oh I don't either. Ohh so mean, okay, I don't.
Actually there's a little bit that I kind of understand.
But from what I gather, they you take your image
and you make it separately. Right, So when you're when
you're looking at a magic I poster, there's usually not
much detail, especially in the ones from the nineties. It's
(40:02):
a star, it's a ball, it's a 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.
Speaker 2 (40:19):
Oh wow, they've.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Gotten really good at 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 gray scale.
So the lighter the gray color shading there is to
the silhouette, the closer it is to you, the darker
it is, the further way it is. Just like you
(40:41):
wouldn't like a regular 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.
The lighter it is, the further away it gets just placed,
(41:03):
the more it's gonna pop out towards you, which indicates
that this part of the pictures in the foreground, it's
closer to you than say the rump of the squirrel.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
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, right, And I
mean that's basically you put that repeating pattern on top
and these vertical strips or rather a computer does, and
then that that program just translates the shades of those
(41:35):
pixels onto that depth map and via magic it all
comes together. Yeah, magic in program. It's neat.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
And when I say sophisticated, I mean it. I saw
it in today. 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 triggerfish in the background, Like there's a middle
ground to the whole thing. Like that's how good they've gotten.
(42:03):
And like I was saying initially, when you see it
and you really see it, you can start looking around
inside the image. It's they it's just so amazing. You
just look up, like I guess, I think I searched
sophisticated stereograms or magic eye or something like that, and
it brought up some really good ones.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
Yeah, it's uh. 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.
(42:45):
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 you know, I remember when they first came around
that I thought it was like some people thought it
was like a snipe punt, right, Yeah, there is no picture,
and it's just a way you fool your friends and
staring at a thing for an hour. So when you
finally have it jump out and it's proven to you,
(43:07):
it's a pretty remarkable feeling.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
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 for fun.
But yeah, the whole thing wasn't just a big in joke.
I'm sure some people thought that for real.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Yeah. So the trick that you can use, 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. Some many of them
(43:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:53):
Wasn't able to do that.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
I am not able to do that either, or maybe
I didn't try long enough. But I always just base
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 unfocusing in
the middle distance.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
Right, Yeah, that's the way that I do it. Just
relax the eyes and let it. Yeah, you just gotta
be patient.
Speaker 2 (44:14):
Gotta be patient.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
I guess that's it. I think basically everybody should go
out and start looking at auto stereograms. Huh.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
Yeah, they're not a joke. Nope, they're really neat images
are really there?
Speaker 1 (44:27):
Yeah, the first time, like you were saying, you see
one pyrotechnics go off and the final countdown starts playing,
it's it's triumphant.
Speaker 2 (44:36):
It's pretty well you always had the final catin I'm playing,
So that's probably what that was.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Yes, I do you got anything else?
Speaker 2 (44:42):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 1 (44:43):
All right?
Speaker 2 (44:43):
Everybody?
Speaker 1 (44:44):
That means, of course, it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (44:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
Oh, we talk about this. I guess I did not
see this one.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
If you remember from the short stuff episode recently on
Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion, I even commended you on the
show for being brave enough to try public math again
and apparently didn't get it right again.
Speaker 1 (45:20):
Is it really a surprise to anybody though?
Speaker 2 (45:23):
I don't know, is it?
Speaker 3 (45:25):
No?
Speaker 2 (45:27):
Let me see here. Let's go with Jake Eichenberger. Hey, guys,
I haven't laughed out loud to myself in a while,
but hearing Chuck compliments Josh Bravery with attempting live math
really hit the spot. I'm sure you get a lot
of emails. But for Celsius to Fahrenheit, you add the
thirty two after the multiplication, not before. And I always
(45:48):
treat one point eight as diprection nine fifths because five
is easy to deal with. So, for instance, for twenty one,
I would use twenty plus one because I use the
fact that twenty is easily to divide by five to
my advantage here. So jeez, now I don't understand any
of this, so blah blah blah math stuff. Now add
(46:10):
the thirty two they came up with thirty six, So
thirty six plus thirty two is sixty eight. And don't
forget about the plus one from earlier. Every one degree
celsius is one point eight, so sixty eight plus one
point eight would be sixty nine point eight as the
optimal butterfly temperature.
Speaker 1 (46:26):
Yeah, I like my version better, even though it produces
incorrect results.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
I mean I wouldn't even have tried it, So hats
off to you for that.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
Thank you, thank you for still commending me, and thank
you to uh who.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
That was just Jake, and let's say all the others.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
Jake at all, I appreciate you guys for correcting me.
Thank you for that. It's been a great day. If
you want to get in touch with us, like Jake
at All did, you can send us an email. Stuff
podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is
(47:02):
a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (47:04):
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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