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How Do "Magic Eye" Stereograms Work?

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Tags: stereograms

The 90s "Magic Eye" pictures were kind of magical — 3D scenes that arose from 2D images with no coloured glasses or special equipment needed. There was a little spate of YouTube videos reminiscing about them this summer, so I thought I'd recreate my old code for building them that I wrote way back when — probably as a literal child on an Atari STe. With the backing of modern hardware and an adult brain, it's obviously a lot nicer now. This is a kind of accompanying video explaining how it all works — there's a slightly-interactive text explainer on the website as well if you prefer to read: https://www.andrewt.net/stereograms/ — ideally I suppose the whole thing is one big package but I've classed it as "video" because, well, half of it is a video and there's no option for "video & ¬ video"

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6.78 Overall score*

34 Rank

10 Votes

6 Comments

Comments

6.6

This can be an interesting activity for students. A bit difficult for the average student.

This is a great video if you know what a stereogram is in the first place. I didn’t so the whole intro was quite confusing. Now I know though, it’s really interesting :).

Fascinating! I’ve been a stereogram viewer for many years, and I’ve always wondered how those auto-stereograms worked.

The content of this entry was very novel and memorable and the presenter had a cheeky style that suited what was being explained very well.

7.4

Very nice video which explains the principle behind the magic eyes illusion really well.

When creating the actual stereogram, I would have liked a bit more care about when and where a colour is picked from the repeating pattern image.

Also, I find crossing my eyes also easier!