No Stupid Questions

I couldn’t for most of my life, but then I just tried about two years ago and it clicked. I’ve been able to ever since. It’s a cognitive skill. Once you learn it, it’s like riding a bike. I hate to make it sound as exclusive as it is, because that’s what turned me off of it to begin with, but it really is true. Just figure it out and it’s like a code that you can decode at will.

As someone with a lazy eye I can control, stereograms are ludicrously easy for me to see.

Yes. They require stereoscopic vision. When I was doing research on 3D displays about 10% of subjects had to be rejected because they were stereo blind. They had no idea they were that way.

One woman said that explains why she had the nickname clunk in high school. She had a habit of rearending cars.

Someone made a modified version of Quake back in the day, that rendered to stereoscopic 3D in a white noise pattern.

It was such a mindfuck to play!

You get 3D depth but no colors or shades or contrast. It's just shapes moving. So doors that were flush with the wall were impossible to see, but enemies in dark rooms were fully visible because there is no light or dark.

I like to imagine I got to experience what a bat sees with echolocation.

Yes.

The instructions say don't cross your eyes but that's horseshit and probably why so many people fail to see them.

My method is to cross my eyes, then uncross them slowly until the 3d effect appears, then hold on that position.

Absolutely loved them as a kid! Had a quite a few books.

You can do them two different ways. The normal way with the object popping out towards you and an inverted way with crossing your eyes that inverts the shape.

I can view the convergent (cross-eyed) ones no problem. I managed once to focus on the divergent ones with like 30 minutes of practice, but I had trouble focusing normally afterwards for like an hour so I haven't tried since.

Now that you've figured it out, behold: Stereograms!

The above satellite images from NASA allow you to SEE the topography in 3D.

My parents were of the opinion they were an elaborate hoax until they had me draw what I saw in one of them.

This was in a newspaper 30 or so years ago maybe. The image was accompanied by a depth-map image of what should be visible, but they covered that up. Then they asked if I'd looked at the newspaper before them because, even with my terrible art skills, it was clearly what was in the depth-map version.

I think they believed me in the end though.

Yep.

If you can do it, you can sometimes use that skill to quickly compare whether two adjacent vertical images are identical. If they are, you will just see a single version of the image as normal. If they are different, you will easily see a ‘fuzzy’ part of the image that won’t resolve and stay still (hard to describe, it’s like when I try to read text in a dream).

A practical application I use now and then is when I want to compare two columns of data on a screen. Use the magic eye technique to overlap the columns and any differences will be immediately obvious, even with a lot of data.

I love them! Generally find that once you get one it's a lot easier. I find that if I've not looked at one for a while, and 8k kit getting it, and I go back to the first one I got (some boxing kangaroos) and normally it just clicks again.

My partner can't see them, and is convinced it's just a dumb hoax that people on the Internet play pretending they can see them.

Yes. I can change my vision's focal point and focus distance at will, so it's usually easy even though my eyesight is getting fucky with age.

I finally realized how to reliably do it in my early 20s (a while ago now) but still can to this day. Just have to start with it at my face haha.

Nope! But I've made them. I needed to go find someone with more normal eyes to test my creations for me, though.

Yes.

Wow, I must be the only person on Lemmy that cannot

This is a great random question. Me likey

I can see them.

Or at least I could. When LGR recently made a video about them, I was having a very bad time viewing them. I was either too drunk or not used to seeing them with this TV setup or I just need new glasses. Probably the last one.

Yeah, but I have to stick my face right up close and slowly move it away to do so.

Phone/tablet screens work best for it.

Yeah I just relax my eyes and then focus the book without moving my line of sight

I can somewhat move my eyes independently. I credit this skill to us having had magic eyes books as a kid and I just learned to control eye muscles willingly.

I see them inverted. I'm left handed, I figure that has something to do with it

I couldn't because really bad astigmatism, but after ICL surgery I could. Magic Eye is really cool, binged the greatest hits after I found out I could see them.

I can see the 3D, but struggle to put together what they are sometimes because I don't have colors to put the image together.

Being legally blind in one eye precludes me from using those

Never, ever been able to see them but then I'm neurodiverse

I didn't think I could but interestingly enough discovered a technique that works earlier today. Basically get really close whilst staring at a point then gradually move away. It actually is an amazing effect

Stereograms? Yeah I can. I've even made them myself.

Nope. Never figured it out

Im in my 30s and learned a few years ago, my brother in law showed me how. Was super cool, I had always thought it was people trolling

I have tried to see them so many times but have never even gotten an inkling.

It's harder than it was before I needed bifocals, but yeah.

Once you learn the trick of it, it gets easier to do.

I wanna say I was late teens/early twenties when they first started showing up in my area, and I stood in the store I first saw one for like a half hour trying to see the image. My vision was kinda bad across the board, even then. But I got the first one, which was a boat, and then flipped through the rest of the selection they had, maybe five or six different ones?

But any time I got new glasses, it would take a few minutes to adjust when I'd run across one again. Same if I needed new ones.

They really are fun

I used to, but its been years since I've tried, and I've had to get stronger glasses a couple of time since then.

Yep. There was one on the Sunday comics page every week when I was a kid, and I learned how to do it then. I never understood the people who can't do it, or thought it was fake.

I can, but it is sometimes tricky. Usually I can make the image go into 3D mode without too much trouble, but I sometimes can't figure out what I'm supposed to be seeing. Like, I can tell that things are at different depths but I have a hard time resolving it into a complete cohesive image. I think it is mostly due to the weird random pattern that makes up the image and the difficulty in finding how the edges work together. It could just be shitty stereograms, though, since most of them work fine.

Yes, you have to imagine you are looking into a mirror at yourself and focus your eyes on that place; look past the image.