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.
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.
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.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
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.
Could meet youa you thought I wasn't real? All you need her lazy eyes.
That's well, no, actually it doesn't work if you have lazy eye.
I know that's the opposite.
We'll get to that later.
I would love to see Jerry in in a Magic I poster popping out in my room.
All right. You know, well, you know, it's actually become so easy to do. There's so many programs out there now that you do it.
Huh.
You could at the very least a more capable and skilled stuff you should know, listener, probably could.
I'll just keep talking about it.
There you go.
That's what we're talking about.
Though.
If you are a person of a certain age, and you were either like a teenager or up probably in the 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 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.
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.
Did you try looking at them again?
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.
Actually, I've got it, Yes, I did.
I finally relax. I guess is what it comes down to. But I've gotten to the point where I can, once I see it, I don't have to keep that focus. I can actually look around inside the picture from like different angles and stuff.
It's really cool. Yeah. I got to that point too, to where like at first I would do the trick where you 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, and you know, the little trick with your eyes, and then there's that polar bear or whatever.
Yeah, but I should say it's been 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, 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.
The poster, like right through it. Yeah.
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 thrilling every single time it is.
It appears to kind of jump away from the rest of the image. But nice definition. But I think we should go back because there's kind of a long and winding road to how we eventually got to the early 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
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 do we do that and come up with like a solid focus on things?
Yeah, I mean I had never really thought about it before, but binocular vision is what you're talking about. 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.
The world, Yeah, very lightly from one another. Right.
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 and richness and uh, maybe even a little kindness depending on what you're looking at.
Yeah, and the brain does this immediately. It figures it out so fast you don't even know what's happening. But we can go all the way back to our friend 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 some ideas that aren't quite right and they're refined over the years until they get to the reality of it.
This is an ain't quite right one.
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 when you can see something in focus, basically, and if.
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 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.
Yeah, that's right. So up next, I guess we can flash forward to this Arab scholar name all has In is what I'm going to say.
I think that's great, right.
And he basically said, all right, what we have is an ability to sense this convergence of our eyes when they focus on an object. And what this is called basically, I don't know if he even said the word depth, but it helps us figure out how far something is, which is depth.
Yes, 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 our eyes are focusing, we actually can feel how our eyes are rotating at any given point, and that's how we know where our eyes are focused or not focused.
Yeah, Descartes said, like googly eyes, you know exactly.
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 one single image with depth is actually from well take a chuck.
Well, you know what's funny is in my notes I had. Wheatstone says, quote, I got this nice exactly what you said.
It's simpatico.
What were you setting me up for?
I don't know.
Well, he had an invention. Can I just describe that at least? Yeah?
The stereoscope.
Yeah, the stereoscope sat. The first version of this that he introduced sat on a table. There's a great picture. It turns out that Brian May of Queen is a big wheatstone slash 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 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 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.
It definitely is.
And that was how he basically proved this, by having each eye look at two separate things, but they're both flat, flat, flat images of the same thing. Basically.
That's really that's key.
Right.
So let's say you had an image of an apple cart. You have two pictures of that apple cart, and your eyes are seeing each one right, because there's that barrier in between your two eyes, so your eye is just seeing the left image, your right eye seeing just the right image.
Right. Yes.
The distinction here, Chuck, and this is where Wheatstone like really laid the foundation for understanding binocular vision is that each of those pictures has to be slightly different in perspective.
That's right.
So either there's a slightly different angle, or you took one picture and then moved a foot to the left and took the other picture, and those are what you're seeing. And what he showed is that the brain can sense 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 it senses depth, those differences in perspective or angle that each eye is feeding the brain as an image.
Yeah. And if you're thinking this sounds like the little viewmaster that you had when you were a kid, that's exactly what it is, same exact thing.
Yeah, And the same way that like the computer went from like a room size thing to a PC to a laptop to our phone. This 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 the computer.
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 VR headset basically.
Yeah, like many binoculars with a slide yeah, coming out of it that you use for focus.
Yeah, and you hold it up to your eyes and it blocks out the rest of the light and stuff. His more portable invention was coinciding with photography becoming more and more developed 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. 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.
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 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 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.
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 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, 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 kind of became the go to for these images.
Yeah, everybody's like close, we're gonna switch it up just a little bit. And still today, if you're an enthusiast into stereoscopic photography, the stereogram is usually the term that you'd use.
All right, I think that's a robust fifteen minutes.
Yeah, all of the nineteenth century stereogram viewers say bully, bully, bully.
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.
If you want to know then you're in luck. Just listen to joshcher seffus no.
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 the foundation to our understanding of binocular vision. But along came in I think the nineteen fifties.
Boy, that sounds like a craft cocktail bar, isn't it.
Bruce Wheatstone Andrews like, you have to have the armband or else you can't get employed.
There. I just got really thirsty. Sorry, go ahead.
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 something out. They just like just in the same way that that Wheatstone's invention kind of led to this neat in this.
Neat party toy toy.
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.
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 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 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 to sort of separate from the background.
Yeah, and so those two separate images, you still see them, but what they do is combine to make a third image in the center, and that's the one that has the say, the circle popping out of it, right.
Yeah.
And 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 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 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
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.
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, 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 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.
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 what they called it, which became better known eventually as the Magic Eye poster.
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 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 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 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 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.
Yeah, he said it was the most compelling optical illusion I'd ever seen.
There you haven't in his own words.
So what he did he said, Okay, I really appreciate your help here, so I'm going to keep going with this 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.
Which who knows what that is. I even tried to figure it out.
So the best I could see is that it's a like, rather than using your computer to figure out if a circuit like a 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 the best I could come up with. It's still very confusing, but that's yeah, that's that.
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.
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, 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.
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 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 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.
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 that much more desirable. He really approached this in a smart way.
A kickstarter of the time probably was mail order exactly.
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.
Very clever, very very clever anything. Yeah, and he dieted everyone.
He just one hundred percent, just to make sure instead of N period e period what you're really saying is a and y.
Thing anything anything.
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 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.
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 like that. I think it's catchy. You forgot the hyphens, No, S T A R E hyphen e hyphens right.
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.
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.
So thank you for that. It's called Muru Muru Mega yaka Nadu MAGICI.
Which means translated.
Your eyesight gets better and better in a very short rate of time. Colon MAGICI.
That's so good, and it was a hit.
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 really kind of blew up.
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, 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 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 up being super popular Magic eyebook.
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, they released a second one and that quickly joined the
first one on the best seller list. America just went nuts for these things.
Yeah.
One reason it went nuts is because there was a certain measure of superiority that you could hold people who.
Couldn't do it, like you'd see it.
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.
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 came up and like got it right away, and he just gets more and more frustrated.
So he's for that.
Yeah, that's sort of playing into what you were talking about with just like feeling like a dummy if you couldn't get it.
Yeah, and 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 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, 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?
That just presses Yeah, that's good.
I couldn't find one. I found a Christmas themed one, but I don't think it was from the do you See What I See?
Book? 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.
Yeah, and that was I think the peak here in ninety three or ninety four was it was huge.
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 company called Hallusion art Prints.
And art prints emphasis on art I think.
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 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.
Maybe ten bucks something like that off.
A poster awsome a quarter. It's good return.
Heck, yeah it is. And they started churning these things out. But like I said, there's an emphasis on art prints, Like they kind of saw theirs as it was different. It was distinguished from the other ones because 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
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.
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.
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
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 one of the employees there who renamed it Magic Eye and Smith's Cherry Smith still owns the company today.
Yeah, that original graphic artist he first partnered with, which is pretty cool. I think that's great.
Yeah, you know, I bet they still make some dough off of this. Yeah.
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, 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 properly because of poor muscular development, people with strabismus in particular.
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.
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 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 called stereo blind. And they can correct that through surgery. But after surgery, they start showing you magic eye posters to train yourself.
Yeah, Ruby had something. It wasn't exactly this, but she has 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
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.
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.
You know, you need to know how to type the word sailboat pretty much.
As a matter of fact, I was looking on how to make a 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, i'd say, we just kind of talk about how they work real quick, okay before we eat.
Yeah.
I still don't quite get it. I mean I kind of know how you can see one, but I still don't quite get how they're made.
Oh I don't either. 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 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.
Oh wow, they've.
Gotten really good at it. But what they do whether it's primitive or really sophisticated. They're taking that image making a 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 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, 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.
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 pixels onto that depth map and via magic it all comes together. Yeah, magic in program. It's neat.
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. 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.
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. 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, it's a pretty remarkable feeling.
It is, And there were a couple over the last day or so where I was like, wait a minute, is this Surely somebody out there has done that for fun. But yeah, the whole thing wasn't just a big in joke. I'm sure some people thought that for real.
Yeah. So the trick that you can 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 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.
Wasn't able to do that.
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.
Right, Yeah, that's the way that I do it. Just relax the eyes and let it. Yeah, you just gotta be patient.
Gotta be patient.
I guess that's it. I think basically everybody should go out and start looking at auto stereograms. Huh.
Yeah, they're not a joke. Nope, they're really neat images are really there?
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.
It's pretty well you always had the final catin I'm playing, So that's probably what that was.
Yes, I do you got anything else?
I got nothing else?
All right?
Everybody?
That means, of course, it's time for listener mail.
So, my friend, I'm just gonna pick one at random. And when I say randomly select, I mean randomly select from the large pool of people who wrote in about your mask.
Oh, we talk about this. I guess I did not see this one.
If you remember from the short stuff episode recently on Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion, I even commended you on the show for being brave enough to try public math again and apparently didn't get it right again.
Is it really a surprise to anybody though?
I don't know, is it?
No?
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 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 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.
Yeah, I like my version better, even though it produces incorrect results.
I mean I wouldn't even have tried it, So hats off to you for that.
Thank you, thank you for still commending me, and thank you to uh who.
That was just Jake, and let's say all the others.
Jake at all, I appreciate you guys for correcting me. Thank you for that. It's been a great day. 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 a production of iHeartRadio.
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