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Magic Eye Illusions · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, we're going on tour and you can come
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: out and see us in Orlando on August twelfth, Nashville
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: on September sixth, and we're gonna wrap it all up
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  Speaker 1: on September ninth in our hometown of Atlanta, GA.
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: That's right, And these are the last shows of the year.
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: This has been a really good show this year. We're
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: super excited about it, and this is going to be
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: your only chance to be in the theater with us,
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: and you know, like fifteen sixteen hundred of your closest pals.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: So go to stuff youshould know dot com and check
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  Speaker 1: out our tour page for links and information, and you
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: can also go to link tree slash sysk for the
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  Speaker 1: same stuff. We'll see you guys this August and September.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Chuck and Jerry's here too. You can't see her, but
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: you can if you relax your eyes lose focus, she
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: may just pop right out at you and be like, hey,
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: I'm Jerry.
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  Speaker 2: Could meet youa you thought I wasn't real? All you
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: need her lazy eyes.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: That's well, no, actually it doesn't work if you have
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: lazy eye.
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  Speaker 2: I know that's the opposite.
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  Speaker 1: We'll get to that later.
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  Speaker 2: I would love to see Jerry in in a Magic
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  Speaker 2: I poster popping out in my room.
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  Speaker 1: All right. You know, well, you know, it's actually become
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  Speaker 1: so easy to do. There's so many programs out there
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  Speaker 1: now that you do it.
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  Speaker 2: Huh.
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  Speaker 1: You could at the very least a more capable and
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: skilled stuff you should know, listener, probably could.
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  Speaker 2: I'll just keep talking about it.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: There you go.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: That's what we're talking about.
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  Speaker 3: Though.
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  Speaker 2: If you are a person of a certain age, and
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: you were either like a teenager or up probably in
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  Speaker 2: the nineteen nineties early nineteen nineties, yep, then you probably,
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  Speaker 2: at some point, much like Ethan Suppley in the movie
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  Speaker 2: Mall Rats, would stand somewhere in a shopping mall at
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  Speaker 2: a wooden kiosk, staring at a poster, waiting for that
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  Speaker 2: shark or that sale to come out from the background
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  Speaker 2: of that poster. Yeah, the hidden, the hidden trick.
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  Speaker 1: I tried it so many times, and I think maybe
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  Speaker 1: one out of fifty I was able. Oh yeah, I
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  Speaker 1: was not good at it, but I have to say Chuck.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: After researching it yesterday and today, my eye muscles have
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  Speaker 1: never been in better shape than they are right now.
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  Speaker 2: Did you try looking at them again?
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  Speaker 1: Yes, I've been popping and locking and like just I'll
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  Speaker 1: be like here, give it to me, bam, I'll see
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  Speaker 1: that one. Oh, let's see another one.
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: Actually, I've got it, Yes, I did.
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  Speaker 1: I finally relax. I guess is what it comes down to.
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  Speaker 1: But I've gotten to the point where I can, once
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  Speaker 1: I see it, I don't have to keep that focus.
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  Speaker 1: I can actually look around inside the picture from like
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  Speaker 1: different angles and stuff.
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  Speaker 2: It's really cool. Yeah. I got to that point too,
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  Speaker 2: to where like at first I would do the trick
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  Speaker 2: where you like in the book version, where you would
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  Speaker 2: hold it very close to your face and slowly back
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  Speaker 2: it away, because as we'll see, that's one technique to
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: see what the hidden picture. But then I got to
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  Speaker 2: where once you once you sort of contrain yourself, then
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  Speaker 2: you can just sort of look at it like you said,
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: and you know, the little trick with your eyes, and
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  Speaker 2: then there's that polar bear or whatever.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, but I should say it's been it's been brought
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  Speaker 1: to our attention. I guess ever since the Millie Vanilli
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  Speaker 1: episode that even like that kind of definition is not
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  Speaker 1: necessarily enough for some of our listeners. So I feel like, no,
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  Speaker 1: I think we should go a little further. If you've
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  Speaker 1: never seen a magic eye poster or you know generically
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  Speaker 1: called the stereogram, what we're talking about is a a strange,
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  Speaker 1: seemingly random pattern of different colors almost splattered across a poster,
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  Speaker 1: and that if you relax your eyes is a certain
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  Speaker 1: way so that you focus as if you're looking beyond.
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  Speaker 2: The poster, like right through it. Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: Hm, in some sort of magic scientific way that will explain,
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  Speaker 1: sort of a three dimensional image suddenly forms. You suddenly
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  Speaker 1: see a three D image that you cannot see if
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  Speaker 1: you're if you're not looking at it the right way. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: when you do see it, there's it's almost inevitable you're
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  Speaker 1: gonna say wow, oh, gosh or something like that. It's
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  Speaker 1: thrilling every single time it is.
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  Speaker 2: It appears to kind of jump away from the rest
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  Speaker 2: of the image. But nice definition. But I think we
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  Speaker 2: should go back because there's kind of a long and
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: winding road to how we eventually got to the early
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  Speaker 2: nineteen nineties with these magic eye posters. That were you know,
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  Speaker 2: they were real fad and we'll get to that. You know,
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  Speaker 2: they sold a lot of those things in a short
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  Speaker 2: amount of time. But it goes all the way back
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  Speaker 2: to the early scientists of the world trying to figure
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  Speaker 2: out how in the world when you have two eyeballs
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  Speaker 2: that are spaced about sixty something millimeters apart. You know,
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  Speaker 2: if they're spaced apart, they're gonna be seeing things f
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  Speaker 2: from a slightly different perspective. And how in the world
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  Speaker 2: do we do that and come up with like a
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  Speaker 2: solid focus on things?
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I had never really thought about it before,
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  Speaker 1: but binocular vision is what you're talking about. And yeah,
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  Speaker 1: by rights, we have two eyes, and like you said,
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  Speaker 1: they're separated by a certain amount of distance, So why
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  Speaker 1: don't we see two images of.
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  Speaker 2: The world, Yeah, very lightly from one another. Right.
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  Speaker 1: What It turns out that if we did do that,
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  Speaker 1: we probably wouldn't be able to see with depth perception.
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  Speaker 1: It's very crazy kind of It's called stereopsis is another
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  Speaker 1: word for depth perception, and it is in combining those
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  Speaker 1: two images that each eye gives the brain that we're
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  Speaker 1: able to see in one complete picture that has depth
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  Speaker 1: and richness and uh, maybe even a little kindness depending
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  Speaker 1: on what you're looking at.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, and the brain does this immediately. It figures it
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  Speaker 2: out so fast you don't even know what's happening. But
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  Speaker 2: we can go all the way back to our friend Ptolemy,
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  Speaker 2: who talked about quite a bit. Yeah, second century Roman astronomer.
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  Speaker 2: And this is one of sort of the early ideas
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  Speaker 2: that were was put forward. And you know, they, as
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  Speaker 2: as with all things sort of science, they put forward
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  Speaker 2: some ideas that aren't quite right and they're refined over
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  Speaker 2: the years until they get to the reality of it.
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  Speaker 1: This is an ain't quite right one.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, ain't quite right because told me he thought that
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  Speaker 2: your eyes sent out raise basically visual rays that hid
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  Speaker 2: an object, and when we're seeing something in focus, that
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  Speaker 2: means it's even it's kind of hard to explain how
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  Speaker 2: bad it is that the eyeball rays will converge on
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  Speaker 2: an object. And when they converge on that object, that's
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  Speaker 2: when you can see something in focus, basically, and if.
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  Speaker 1: They converge in it too much, they burn it to
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  Speaker 1: a cinder. Excellently, he had it, he picked up there's
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  Speaker 1: two things. He had it backwards. We're actually accepting rays
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  Speaker 1: rather than shooting him out, so he's kind of getting there.
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  Speaker 1: And then he noticed that our two eyes create an
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  Speaker 1: that's our focus. It can be wide narrow, depending on
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  Speaker 1: what we're looking at. If it's far away, the focus
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  Speaker 1: is going to be at a sharper angle. If it's closer,
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  Speaker 1: it's going to be at a wider angle. And he
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  Speaker 1: was onto something, but he didn't. He who wasn't able
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  Speaker 1: to really put two and two together, and then he
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  Speaker 1: died and that was it for him.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. So up next, I guess we can
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  Speaker 2: flash forward to this Arab scholar name all has In
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  Speaker 2: is what I'm going to say.
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  Speaker 1: I think that's great, right.
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  Speaker 2: And he basically said, all right, what we have is
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  Speaker 2: an ability to sense this convergence of our eyes when
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  Speaker 2: they focus on an object. And what this is called basically,
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  Speaker 2: I don't know if he even said the word depth,
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  Speaker 2: but it helps us figure out how far something is,
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  Speaker 2: which is depth.
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  Speaker 1: Yes, And so his idea was that we could we
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  Speaker 1: had some sort of sense that we was so involuntary
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  Speaker 1: we weren't even aware of it, and that's how we
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  Speaker 1: knew its true. Yeah, for sure, but still not quite right.
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  Speaker 1: There about six hundred years later, Kepler and Descartes kind
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  Speaker 1: of picked up on something similar, and they said, rather
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  Speaker 1: than being able to sense the degree of convergence that
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  Speaker 1: our eyes are focusing, we actually can feel how our
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  Speaker 1: eyes are rotating at any given point, and that's how
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  Speaker 1: we know where our eyes are focused or not focused.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, Descartes said, like googly eyes, you know exactly.
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  Speaker 1: And so like it was just wrong, wrong, wrong. Finally,
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  Speaker 1: in the eighteen thirties, an Englishman stepped up. His name
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  Speaker 1: was Sir Charles Wheatstone. Yeah, and he said, I've got this.
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  Speaker 1: Everybody check this out. I have invented an invention that
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  Speaker 1: will prove that my hypothesis of binocular vision providing us
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  Speaker 1: one single image with depth is actually from well take
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  Speaker 1: a chuck.
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  Speaker 2: Well, you know what's funny is in my notes I had.
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  Speaker 2: Wheatstone says, quote, I got this nice exactly what you said.
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  Speaker 1: It's simpatico.
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  Speaker 2: What were you setting me up for?
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  Speaker 1: I don't know.
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  Speaker 2: Well, he had an invention. Can I just describe that
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  Speaker 2: at least? Yeah?
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  Speaker 1: The stereoscope.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, the stereoscope sat. The first version of this that
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  Speaker 2: he introduced sat on a table. There's a great picture.
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  Speaker 2: It turns out that Brian May of Queen is a
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  Speaker 2: big wheatstone slash three D stereogram binocular vision enthusiast, and
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  Speaker 2: so there's some cool pictures of him looking at this
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  Speaker 2: through this original stereoscope. So it sits on a desk
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  Speaker 2: and in the center you put your eyes up to
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  Speaker 2: you know, what looks like a little viewmaster or a
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  Speaker 2: VR headset basically, and it has these two angled mirrors,
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  Speaker 2: one for each eye. So when you look through it,
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  Speaker 2: it angles one eye out to the right and one
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  Speaker 2: eye out to the left, and in that peripheral vision
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  Speaker 2: on each side there's a little small wooden wall with
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  Speaker 2: a picture on each one. So one eye is looking
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  Speaker 2: at the left picture, the right eye is looking at
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  Speaker 2: the right picture, and you you know, it has two
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  Speaker 2: little thumbholes that you hold. It's very elegantly a little
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  Speaker 2: steampunk looking thing.
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  Speaker 1: It definitely is.
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  Speaker 2: And that was how he basically proved this, by having
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  Speaker 2: each eye look at two separate things, but they're both flat, flat,
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  Speaker 2: flat images of the same thing. Basically.
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  Speaker 1: That's really that's key.
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  Speaker 2: Right.
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  Speaker 1: So let's say you had an image of an apple cart.
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  Speaker 1: You have two pictures of that apple cart, and your
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  Speaker 1: eyes are seeing each one right, because there's that barrier
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  Speaker 1: in between your two eyes, so your eye is just
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  Speaker 1: seeing the left image, your right eye seeing just the
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  Speaker 1: right image.
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  Speaker 2: Right. Yes.
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  Speaker 1: The distinction here, Chuck, and this is where Wheatstone like
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  Speaker 1: really laid the foundation for understanding binocular vision is that
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  Speaker 1: each of those pictures has to be slightly different in perspective.
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  Speaker 2: That's right.
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  Speaker 1: So either there's a slightly different angle, or you took
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  Speaker 1: one picture and then moved a foot to the left
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  Speaker 1: and took the other picture, and those are what you're seeing.
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  Speaker 1: And what he showed is that the brain can sense
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  Speaker 1: those slight, slight differences in perspective and that's what it
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  Speaker 1: uses when it combines two images into one image in
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  Speaker 1: your field of view to give it depth. That's how
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  Speaker 1: it senses depth, those differences in perspective or angle that
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  Speaker 1: each eye is feeding the brain as an image.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah. And if you're thinking this sounds like the little
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  Speaker 2: viewmaster that you had when you were a kid, that's
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  Speaker 2: exactly what it is, same exact thing.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, And the same way that like the computer went
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  Speaker 1: from like a room size thing to a PC to
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: a laptop to our phone. This this stereoscope did the
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: same thing. It was a big clunky thing, the steampunk version,
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: and then it got increasingly smaller and easier to handle
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: and more handy, although it was much less revolutionary than
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: the computer.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, they made it like, they made it more handheld.
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  Speaker 2: Those in particular, there was in the eighteen forties there
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: was a Scottish physicist who will be pretty prominent in
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: this whole story named David Brewster, Sir David Brewster, and
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: he's the one that invented if you've ever seen one
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: of these in a museum or something, sort of the
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: early handheld version that looks like a little handheld steampunk
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  Speaker 2: VR headset basically.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, like many binoculars with a slide yeah, coming out
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  Speaker 1: of it that you use for focus.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, and you hold it up to your eyes and
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: it blocks out the rest of the light and stuff.
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  Speaker 2: His more portable invention was coinciding with photography becoming more
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: and more developed in sort of like proper photography, and
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: so all of a sudden it was this popular thing,
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  Speaker 2: and this was sort of the first fad of the stereogram.
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: There were a couple of big ones. It was one
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: of the nineteen nineties and one in the mid nineteenth century.
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  Speaker 2: Queen Victoria went nuts for this thing in eighteen fifty
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: one at the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, and all
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: of a sudden, people just wanted these things to play
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: with and look through and marvel at. Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: Right from the eighteen fifties to the nineteen thirties when
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: radio finally came in and took over that there was
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: basically not a parlor in the UK or America that
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: didn't have one of these things. Like you just amused
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: yourself with them. The fact that there were companies that
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: were producing hundreds of thousands or millions of different stereoscopic
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: images for you to look at. I mean, you could
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: just spend endless hours of entertainment looking at one thing
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: or another. And they would take images of like scenic landmarks.
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: Sure supposedly stereoscopic images of like Yellowstone. I think the
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: Yellowstone Area actually convinced congressmen back east that there actually
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: was an amazing wilderness out there that should that's worth preserved. Yeah, exactly.
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: It really made it pop. In other words, they also
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: very quickly started making porn with it. Everything that you
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: would imagine people doing when they figured out how to
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: make pictures that really stand out with depth, Yeah you did.
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: They were like, these are fantastic, but what's better than
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: a landscape? Ladies' ankles? Pretty much the original The original
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: piece of equipment used to make these were stereo cameras,
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: and they were these cameras with two lenses that kind
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: of mimic the eyes. They're said about eye with the
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: part and those were around for a while, and there
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: are still enthusiasts that own stereo cameras, as we'll see
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: in a little bit. That kind of figures into how
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: they became popular in the nineties. But in the United States,
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: while all this was going on, American surgeon Oliver Wendelholmes
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: senior papa of Oliver Wendelholmes Junior of the spring Court fame,
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: he's invented one in the United States and he's like,
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: you know what, this thing's so great, I'm not even
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: going to patent it. I want all kind of companies
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: to make these, and I want these spread far and wide.
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: I guess he was a surgeon, so he wouldn't hurt
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: her anything, right, and people, I think he's the one
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: that coined the term stereograph, and then the word stereogram
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: kind of became the go to for these images.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, everybody's like close, we're gonna switch it up just
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: a little bit. And still today, if you're an enthusiast
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: into stereoscopic photography, the stereogram is usually the term that
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: you'd use.
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: All right, I think that's a robust fifteen minutes.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, all of the nineteenth century stereogram viewers say bully, bully, bully.
• 15:34
  Speaker 2: That's right, bully in three D. So we'll be back
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: to talk about the next development, which was the auto
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: stereogram right after this.
• 15:42
  Speaker 3: If you want to know then you're in luck. Just
• 15:46
  Speaker 3: listen to joshcher seffus no.
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: Stuffus, no, all right, check. Now we finally get to
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: this stuff where I'm fascinated. Yeah, just riveted, right because
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  Speaker 1: it's it's enough that our friends Wheatstone and Brewster contributed
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: the foundation to our understanding of binocular vision. But along
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: came in I think the nineteen fifties.
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: Boy, that sounds like a craft cocktail bar, isn't it.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: Bruce Wheatstone Andrews like, you have to have the armband
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: or else you can't get employed.
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: There. I just got really thirsty. Sorry, go ahead.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: There was a scientist a neuroscientist named Bella. ULA's had
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: tip to Chuck for that one who ran the Sensory
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: and Perceptual Processes department at AT and T Bell Labs. Again,
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: I think, I said in the fifties, and ULA's was,
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: I guess kind of focused on visual perception and figure
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: something out. They just like just in the same way
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: that that Wheatstone's invention kind of led to this neat
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: in this.
• 17:07
  Speaker 2: Neat party toy toy.
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, ULA's invention kind of did the same thing, but
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: neither one of them were trying to create an amusement.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: They were they were creating a way to prove a
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: hypothesis that they were interested in. And what he did
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: was come up with the random dot stereogram.
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so this is uh, he basically start by let's
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: say you have like a square or something that you
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: fill in randomly with black dots, and then within that
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: square you picked a part of it and decide on
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: like maybe a shape or something. So within that that square,
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: you'll say, all right, well, I'm gonna select a circle
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: within that, like maybe right in the middle, and I'm
• 17:50
  Speaker 2: going to create a second square that's just like the first,
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: except that circle in the center that I've selected is
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: just going to be shifted just a little bit, kind
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: of like we were talking about, that slight, slight difference
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: of perspective. Yeah, and then when you put these two
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: squares side by side, and when you look at these
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: two squares, you can look at it through a stereoscope
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: if you have one. But the key here is is
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: that he would prove that, like, hey, you can just
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: do this with your naked eye if you learn the
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: trick that people will be trying to figure out, you know,
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: up until twenty twenty three with future podcaster Josh Clark,
• 18:25
  Speaker 2: where you unFocus your eyes and then those circles appear
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: to sort of separate from the background.
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and so those two separate images, you still see them,
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: but what they do is combine to make a third
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: image in the center, and that's the one that has
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: the say, the circle popping out of it, right.
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: And Youlss obviously created the foundation for magic eye posters
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: with that. But what he did more than anything was
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: show that what our brain does when it takes in
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: those two separate images and slightly different perspectives because their
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: eyes are separated just ever so slightly, it compares basically
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: pixel for pixel each of the each of the images
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: that the eye send it and matches it up, and
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: then when it finds parts that don't quite match up,
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: it uses that to create the illusion of depth. And
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: that's what his random dot stereogram showed that what your
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: eye is doing is taking those two those two pictures
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: and matching up every single random dot in there and
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: then noticing all this is in a nanosecond, noticing what
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: it doesn't match up, and then that's that circle that
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: pops out. And then the way that he proved it
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: is because those two different pictures form a single image
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: in the center. Right, Yeah, So if you weren't looking
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: at two pictures, you were just using two eyes at
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: one picture, then that effect would still be produced. And
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: it really just kind of laid the foundation in showing
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: just exactly how our brain makes binocular vision into depth perception.
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: Right, So we're inching closer to the nineties and that
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: singular poster or coffee table book image that we all knew,
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: but it came to us in the nineteen seventies thanks
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: to a student of u Less's named Christopher Tyler, who
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: was a neuroscientist and he basically said, you know what,
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: we don't even need the two pictures. Everybody like you're
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: doing pretty good, but what if, like how mind blowing
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: would it be if we could do this all from
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: a single image. He called it the auto stereogram and
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: basically made it to where it's sort of like this,
• 20:47
  Speaker 2: like staring at a wallpaper. And in fact, I think
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: was he the one here? Then it was Brewster who
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: stared at wallpaper, and that's how they figured that out.
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: He was an odd duck, which is interesting. But Tyler
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: got together with a programmer named Maureen Clark and said, well,
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: we can probably figure this out with math, So that
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: they created an algorithm that could insert these images into
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: what looks like just almost like white noise on paper.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And so they did away with all the crud,
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: those extra two images that still remain when that third
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: when they come together and form that illusory third image
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: in the middle. Yeah, so that you just see something
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: as you normally would see it. But if you adjust
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: your eyes just the right way, then that three D
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: image is going to come out. And now we finally
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: arrive in the nineteen seventies at the auto stereogram is
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: what they called it, which became better known eventually as
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: the Magic Eye poster.
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: Right, So, if you're listening to this and you're thinking,
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: all right, guys, this is the nineteen seventies. You keep
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: talking about the grunge era. How did we get from
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: the nineteen seventies to the grunge era or why didn't
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: we get there quicker? Basically? And one of the reasons
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: is this guy named Tom Shay. He's from Connecticut. He
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: has sort of a sounds like, sort of a hippie
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: dippy backstory through the nineteen sixties, working all kinds of
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: crazy jobs, but was like a super bright guy, a
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: mathematician and musician. Eventually got you know, real grown up
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: type jobs like helped NASA make their navigation systems, working
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: with a company called Intermetrics, and in the early nineties
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: landed at a British tech company called Pentica. And this
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: thing all came together really in the in the thing
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: that we all knew in love in the nineties because
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: of advertising. They had a product Pentica did called the
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: mime Capital mim in Circuit Emulator, and they were Boushet
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: was tasked to designing an ad for this thing, and
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: so he said, Hey, let's put a real mime in
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: this advertisement. It's all very serendipitous because it really is
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: this mime that they hired. It's either Lab or labby
• 22:56
  Speaker 2: Labb shows up on set and it turns out that
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: Lab was one of those stereo photography enthusiasts that still
• 23:05
  Speaker 2: had those you know, dual lensed stereo cameras. He happened
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: to bring this thing in on the set and Bashet
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: was like, OMG, what is that thing and just was like,
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: sounds like it was just instantly sort of taken with
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: his idea.
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he said it was the most compelling optical illusion
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: I'd ever seen.
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: There you haven't in his own words.
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: So what he did he said, Okay, I really appreciate
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: your help here, so I'm going to keep going with
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: this mime ad, but I'm also going to try to
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: make another ad using one of these auto stereograms, and
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: he did. He made one that had the hidden message
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: M seven hundred, which was a version of their in
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: circuit emulator that his company made.
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: Which who knows what that is. I even tried to
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: figure it out.
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: So the best I could see is that it's a like,
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: rather than using your computer to figure out if a
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: circuit like a microprocess or a circuit board works. This
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: thing emulates either your computer or a circuit board so
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: that you can find individual bugs and fix them. That's
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: the best I could come up with. It's still very confusing,
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: but that's yeah, that's that.
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: And just so as a listener, you're not confused. That
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: has nothing to do with what happened. It was just
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: a product. It could have been a widget or whatever, definitely,
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: but the idea was it was another ad that he
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: actually used the technology to make a autostereogram for this ad.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: And this ad was so it made such an impression
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: on people that it made it out of the pages
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: of Embedded Systems Engineering Magazine into something of like the
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: general corporate culture. And all of a sudden, at his
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: desk at Pentica, but Shea starts getting faxes from people saying, Hey,
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: can you make me and my company one of those
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: really neat ads that you made? And he ended up
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: kind of creating like a little mini side job for himself,
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: creating custom auto stereograms for people who faxed him and
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: asked for him.
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he was no artist, though, so very smartly. In
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: nineteen ninety one, he hooked up with a woman named
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: Sherry Smith, who was an artist, a freelancer, and I
• 25:26
  Speaker 2: think was also a computer graphics person, and so he said,
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: you're perfect. You're an artist and you know computer graphics,
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: so you can kick this thing up a notch and
• 25:36
  Speaker 2: basically make images that are a little more interesting to
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: look at. But it was still sort of an advertising
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: thing because they made one for American Airlines for their
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: in flight magazine that was really popular and apparently for
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: a while at least they would give away a bottle
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: of champagne. I would think a glass, but I guess
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: a bottle of champagne to the first person on the
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: flight who could find the image and say what it was.
• 26:00
  Speaker 2: Of course it was an airplane. But after the American
• 26:03
  Speaker 2: Airlines ad thing, Boshe was like, wait a minute, like
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: people are going nuts for this in ads. But I think,
• 26:09
  Speaker 2: like people are going so crazy for this, I think
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: we could just sell these somehow, right.
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: Take his job for making these four other companies and
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: just make them and sell them directly to the public.
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: And he actually started out doing mail order. He was
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: he realized he was onto something because he started doing
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: mail order in order to try to kick off a
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: fad that he could then go and license to other
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: people or partner with a big company and make himself
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: that much more desirable. He really approached this in a
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: smart way.
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: A kickstarter of the time probably was mail order exactly.
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a really great analogy. And he created a
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: company or either he created it or he already had
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: it and repurposed it. N period e period thing enterprises.
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: Very clever, very very clever anything. Yeah, and he dieted everyone.
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: He just one hundred percent, just to make sure instead
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: of N period e period what you're really saying is
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: a and y.
• 27:06
  Speaker 2: Thing anything anything.
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: We're anything enterprises, right, so anything N period e period
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: Thing Enterprises partnered with a Japanese company called Tenyoh and
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: Tenya was a magic trick maker. They still are as
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: far as I can tell, and they said, this actually
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: is amazing, and we think our friends in Japan are
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: going to go crazy for it, and they licensed it
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: and started publishing books based on the Magic Eye what
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: would come to be No Magic Eye as Magic Eye,
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: And apparently it was the ten Year company that said,
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: let's call it Magic Eye because the name you have
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: for it is stupid.
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: I disagree. They called it Magic Eye because, like you said,
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: they were a magic trick company and had a line
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: of magic this, magic that. But I think Boushat's original
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: name stereos hyphen or I guess Kama the Amazing Thing
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: gays toys, So you have to spell it out well,
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: S T A R E stare stereos. I kind of
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: like that. I think it's catchy. You forgot the hyphens, No,
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: S T A R E hyphen e hyphens right.
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: You know who would love this bishet? Guys Jonathan Strickland. Yeah,
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: he's a puny type, so I think Strickland would be like,
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: You're my kind of guy, for sure.
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: I think you should tell everyone, though, the great great
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: name of or rather the great translated name of the
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: first book that they put out in Japan of these.
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: So thank you for that. It's called Muru Muru Mega
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: yaka Nadu MAGICI.
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: Which means translated.
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: Your eyesight gets better and better in a very short
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: rate of time. Colon MAGICI.
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: That's so good, and it was a hit.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: Apparently it was the best seller. Very quickly I think
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: they started I read they started selling them on street
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: corners and then very quickly after that, the first print,
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: the first printing ran out and they they made an
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: huge run and that sold out, and it was just
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: a hit in Japan. And it's interesting it went from
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: America to Japan and then back to America where it
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: really kind of blew up.
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess Bashad didn't have from what I could tell,
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: he was partnered in Japan, but I guess still had
• 29:18
  Speaker 2: the rights to do it in the United States, even though,
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: as we'll see, like he didn't own this idea like
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: no one did, because other people came along later. It
• 29:27
  Speaker 2: was it wasn't like a specific technology you could patent
• 29:30
  Speaker 2: or anything. But he was the first person in the US,
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: it looks like, to bring it over here and partner
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: with a guy named Bob Slitski who was a former
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: colleague at Pentica. And it sounds like Slitski was a
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: guy who just made a more robust computer program to
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: automate the stuff, to make it easier to come up
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: with different images, and then also colorize it so they
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: were previously black and white, and all of a sudden
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: you could do these things which made them look sharper. Evidently,
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: they hooked up with a licensing agent named Mark Gregorrek
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: who said, hey, this thing like we could license the
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: cred out of this person. Thing we had to do
• 30:12
  Speaker 2: was get in a book, which they did in nineteen
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: ninety three, and that was that very first what ended
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: up being super popular Magic eyebook.
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, think about how Saren dippis it is,
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: starting with Ron lab and then all of the people
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: he met along the way who ended up making this
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: the fad that it became. He really lucked out. He
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: fell backwards into something really interesting. But they released a
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: bunch of books. But while the first Magic Eyebook in
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: the United States was still fresh on the best seller list,
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: they released a second one and that quickly joined the
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: first one on the best seller list. America just went
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: nuts for these things.
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: One reason it went nuts is because there was a
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: certain measure of superiority that you could hold people who.
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: Couldn't do it, like you'd see it.
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: There were people out there, including me, you just couldn't
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: do it, and you just get so mad and frustrated,
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: and people who could do it found that really satisfying.
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: I've always suspected.
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it took me a while. It wasn't like I
• 31:10
  Speaker 2: instantaneously got it. But I eventually did. And that was
• 31:13
  Speaker 2: kind of the joke in Mall Rats. I don't know
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: if you ever saw that movie. I didn't, but it was,
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: you know, the Kevin Smith movie, I guess, right after
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: Clerk's and Ethan Suppley, like I said, would stare and
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: stare at it, and people were making fun of him,
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: and like there's one scene like these two little kids
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: came up and like got it right away, and he
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: just gets more and more frustrated.
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: So he's for that.
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's sort of playing into what you were talking
• 31:37
  Speaker 2: about with just like feeling like a dummy if you
• 31:39
  Speaker 2: couldn't get it.
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and that definitely was a thing. I've read, you
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: know a number of like kind of retrospectives about it,
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: and most of them were from people who couldn't get it,
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: and they still seemed slightly bitter, but they still can't
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: get it, you know, thirty years on or whatever. But
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: it was. It was enormous, not just at mal kiosks,
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: but in books. There is a comic strip that's still
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: around that you can license through UPI if you want.
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: It showed up on Honeynut Cheerios boxes. There were postcards,
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: other companies came a call in and said, hey, we
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: want you to make some of these for us, like Disney.
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: I think CBS had them do something for like one
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: of their internal sales booklets. It just started showing up everywhere,
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: and I think the cream of the crop of like
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: additional stuff that came out of this was a book
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: that Boshet put together, a magic eyebook for Christmas called
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: do you See What I See?
• 32:37
  Speaker 2: That just presses Yeah, that's good.
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: I couldn't find one. I found a Christmas themed one,
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: but I don't think it was from the do you
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: See What I See?
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: Book? That's disappointing. It was a little bit so Bishey
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: basically said in nineteen ninety four, in one year he
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: estimates that they raked in between two hundred and a
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: quarter of a million bucks or sorry, quarter of a
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: billion billion dollars and hundred and fifty million.
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and that was I think the peak here in
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: ninety three or ninety four was it was huge.
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: All right, So Bashe is going strong. Early nineties, Like
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: I said, no one owned this idea. It's not a
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: particular technology. So people started jumping on board and doing
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: their own and the main standout to me, I think
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: is are the guys who if you saw them at
• 33:28
  Speaker 2: the mall kiosks, you probably saw the version from a
• 33:31
  Speaker 2: company called Hallusion art Prints.
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: And art prints emphasis on art I think.
• 33:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And so these guys, Paul Huber, who's an aerospace engineer,
• 33:41
  Speaker 2: and a software engineer named Mike Belinsky, they were turned
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: on by these things too, and they said, hey, this
• 33:48
  Speaker 2: is pretty great. We're two smart guys. We can build
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: our own computer program and algorithm to make these things ourselves.
• 33:54
  Speaker 2: And they started making these posters in ninety two, and
• 33:59
  Speaker 2: that those were the Hallusion art prints that you would
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: most likely those are the ones. Like I said that
• 34:03
  Speaker 2: you were seeing it at the kiosk for about twenty
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: to twenty five bucks. These guys were printing these things
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: for a quarter. Even with like if they're wholesaling these
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: things to the kiosk, they're still making some pretty good
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: dough off of that. Yeah, kind of mark.
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: Maybe ten bucks something like that off.
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: A poster awsome a quarter. It's good return.
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: Heck, yeah it is. And they started churning these things out.
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: But like I said, there's an emphasis on art prints,
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: Like they kind of saw theirs as it was different.
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: It was distinguished from the other ones because they were
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: just so well made. The problem is is people are like,
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: that's great, I can still get the same effect from
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: a similar one from one of your competitors for five
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: dollars at Spencer's rather than twenty five dollars at your
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: admittedly very charming Kiosk. Right, I'm gonna go with the
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: five dollars one. And so they set themselves up for
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: some pretty serious competition out of the gate.
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, big time. And there are all kinds of people
• 34:57
  Speaker 2: pumping these things out. But like you said, you go
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: to the Kiosk, you get your ears pierced, sure by
• 35:03
  Speaker 2: a top quality seventeen year old twenty five times. Excuse me,
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: Oh don't know. I meant purchase a top quality poster. Okay,
• 35:11
  Speaker 2: but yeah, you're also getting your ear piers by a
• 35:13
  Speaker 2: top quality seventeen Claire's piercing Pagoda or Claies or something.
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: So Basha their company started to fade a little bit
• 35:22
  Speaker 2: because of the competition, and he thought, like when he
• 35:26
  Speaker 2: was interviewed in ninety four by Ink magazine, he thought
• 35:31
  Speaker 2: this was like, Hey, this is the beginning. We're going
• 35:33
  Speaker 2: to be huge. His literal quote was talking about being
• 35:36
  Speaker 2: a Disney of the twenty first century and like making
• 35:40
  Speaker 2: it into a big multimedia company. And then many years later,
• 35:44
  Speaker 2: in like the late twenty sixteen or twenty seventeen, he
• 35:49
  Speaker 2: reflected back and said, well, as it turns out, maybe
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: that was just my fifteen minutes and it wasn't that
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: much fun and it was really exhausting. He ended up
• 35:58
  Speaker 2: selling his majority State and Anything to Smith and another
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: one of the employees there who renamed it Magic Eye
• 36:07
  Speaker 2: and Smith's Cherry Smith still owns the company today.
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that original graphic artist he first partnered with, which
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: is pretty cool. I think that's great.
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I bet they still make some dough
• 36:16
  Speaker 2: off of this. Yeah.
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: Can you imagine if today we were you know, you'd
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: tell your friend I'm going to Anything Enterprises this summer
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: and then we say World or Land. Yeah, just doesn't
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: quite have that ring, you know, No, it doesn't. So, Yeah,
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: that fad ran its course. Even during the heat of it.
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: Everybody but Boshet was well aware this is a fad,
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: and he knew, but he was hoping beyond hope that
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: he could turn it and parlay it into something else. Right. Yeah,
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: But as much as the rest of the world kind
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: of moved on from stereograms. They proved to be a
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: really useful training technique for people whose eyes don't align
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: properly because of poor muscular development, people with strabismus in particular.
• 37:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it almost they'll do like these little exercises. I'll
• 37:13
  Speaker 2: give you these exercises to do, and it's almost like
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: a workout for your eyeball, right, to build that muscle
• 37:18
  Speaker 2: back up.
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Apparently there's a critical window when you're young,
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: I think up to about three maybe four where your
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: brain learns to put together the two different pictures that
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: it's eye, your eyes are giving it into one cohesive hole,
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: and that if your eyes aren't aligned properly, or there's
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: another condition where one eye is way more dominant than
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: the other, your brain just disregards the picture from the
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: non dominant or non aligned eye and just relies on
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: the dominant or you know, straight eye and you don't
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: see in depth. You just have monocular vision. You're getting
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: information from both eyes. They both work just fine, but
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: your brain's just disregarding one and so you you're what's
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: called stereo blind. And they can correct that through surgery.
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: But after surgery, they start showing you magic eye posters
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: to train yourself.
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Ruby had something. It wasn't exactly this, but she
• 38:14
  Speaker 2: has has always had like when she's really tired, one
• 38:17
  Speaker 2: of her eyes can go wonky. Yeah it is. And
• 38:20
  Speaker 2: when she was little she wore a patch for a
• 38:22
  Speaker 2: little while and then you know, we've kept taking her
• 38:25
  Speaker 2: to the to the eye doctor all these years and
• 38:27
  Speaker 2: they finally were like, you know, it's fine, Like she's
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: she's basically corrected it. It still happens sometimes when she's
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: super tired, and I'll just say, I'll say, maybe, you know,
• 38:36
  Speaker 2: snap your eyes together, and she go zoop and she can.
• 38:40
  Speaker 2: She can do it on purpose, so she kind of
• 38:42
  Speaker 2: learned how to control it. I guess that's pretty cute. Yeah,
• 38:46
  Speaker 2: it's interesting.
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: So if you wanted to make a magic eye puzzle, Uh,
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: there's just a few things you need to know. Actually
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: you do. You don't really need to know anything about
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: it because today there's so many free like like stereogram
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: building software available.
• 39:05
  Speaker 2: You know, you need to know how to type the
• 39:06
  Speaker 2: word sailboat pretty much.
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, I was looking on how
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: to make a stereogram. I found an Instructibles article and
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: I opened it up said eight steps to making a
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: stereogram or auto stereogram image. Step one was download a
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: stereogram maker program. Key, yeah, exactly. But what you're doing is,
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: i'd say, we just kind of talk about how they
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: work real quick, okay before we eat.
• 39:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 39:34
  Speaker 2: I still don't quite get it. I mean I kind
• 39:36
  Speaker 2: of know how you can see one, but I still
• 39:38
  Speaker 2: don't quite get how they're made.
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: Oh I don't either. Ohh so mean, okay, I don't.
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: Actually there's a little bit that I kind of understand.
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: But from what I gather, they you take your image
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: and you make it separately. Right, So when you're when
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: you're looking at a magic I poster, there's usually not
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: much detail, especially in the ones from the nineties. It's
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: a star, it's a ball, it's a I think it's
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: a dragon kind of thing. It's just an outline a silhouette.
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: And they've gotten way more sophisticated since then to I
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: saw one today that was a squirrel and you could
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: see the pupil in the squirrel's eye like it was
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: really sophisticated.
• 40:19
  Speaker 2: Oh wow, they've.
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: Gotten really good at it. But what they do whether
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: it's primitive or really sophisticated. They're taking that image making
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: a silhouette, but they're giving the silhouette depth using gray scale.
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: So the lighter the gray color shading there is to
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: the silhouette, the closer it is to you, the darker
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: it is, the further way it is. Just like you
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: wouldn't like a regular like a charcoal drawing of something, right,
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: except there's nothing in the middle. And then the computer
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: program takes that computer generated image and it assigns different
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: values depending on how light or dark along the gray
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: scale each pixel is, and that's how much it gets displaced.
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: The lighter it is, the further away it gets just placed,
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: the more it's gonna pop out towards you, which indicates
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: that this part of the pictures in the foreground, it's
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: closer to you than say the rump of the squirrel.
• 41:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so the white parts would be closer, the dark
• 41:15
  Speaker 2: parts would appear more distant, and that creates the depth.
• 41:19
  Speaker 2: But then you still have to have that repeating pattern
• 41:22
  Speaker 2: laid out over the top of it, right, And I
• 41:24
  Speaker 2: mean that's basically you put that repeating pattern on top
• 41:28
  Speaker 2: and these vertical strips or rather a computer does, and
• 41:32
  Speaker 2: then that that program just translates the shades of those
• 41:35
  Speaker 2: pixels onto that depth map and via magic it all
• 41:41
  Speaker 2: comes together. Yeah, magic in program. It's neat.
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: And when I say sophisticated, I mean it. I saw
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: it in today. I'm really sad I didn't send it
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: to you. I meant to. But it is basically a
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: coral reef scene with different you can tell the different
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: kinds of fish, Like there's different clownfish closer in the foreground,
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: there's like triggerfish in the background, Like there's a middle
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: ground to the whole thing. Like that's how good they've gotten.
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: And like I was saying initially, when you see it
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: and you really see it, you can start looking around
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: inside the image. It's they it's just so amazing. You
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: just look up, like I guess, I think I searched
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: sophisticated stereograms or magic eye or something like that, and
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: it brought up some really good ones.
• 42:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's uh. And what you mentioned earlier about like
• 42:28
  Speaker 2: the fact that you couldn't see him for so long,
• 42:30
  Speaker 2: you can only have this feeling once, which is not
• 42:34
  Speaker 2: ever being able to see one, to finally seeing your
• 42:36
  Speaker 2: first one. And when that picture jumps out from the
• 42:41
  Speaker 2: poster the very first time. It is like it's a thrill.
• 42:45
  Speaker 2: You're like, I finally got it. I see what you mean.
• 42:48
  Speaker 2: Because there's also this idea, which of course isn't true.
• 42:51
  Speaker 2: But you know, I remember when they first came around
• 42:54
  Speaker 2: that I thought it was like some people thought it
• 42:57
  Speaker 2: was like a snipe punt, right, Yeah, there is no picture,
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: and it's just a way you fool your friends and
• 43:02
  Speaker 2: staring at a thing for an hour. So when you
• 43:05
  Speaker 2: finally have it jump out and it's proven to you,
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: it's a pretty remarkable feeling.
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: It is, And there were a couple over the last
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: day or so where I was like, wait a minute,
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: is this Surely somebody out there has done that for fun.
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: But yeah, the whole thing wasn't just a big in joke.
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: I'm sure some people thought that for real.
• 43:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So the trick that you can use, there's a
• 43:25
  Speaker 2: few tricks. One is the one I mentioned earlier, is like,
• 43:28
  Speaker 2: if it's not a poster and it's a piece of paper,
• 43:31
  Speaker 2: you can hold hold it very close to your nose
• 43:34
  Speaker 2: where you can't even really focus on it, and very
• 43:37
  Speaker 2: slowly pull it away, but try and keep your try
• 43:41
  Speaker 2: not to focus on it still. Some many of them
• 43:45
  Speaker 2: will have two little objects, like two dots above the
• 43:48
  Speaker 2: whole thing, and they say, like, stare at those and
• 43:51
  Speaker 2: unFocus until you see three of them.
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: Wasn't able to do that.
• 43:55
  Speaker 2: I am not able to do that either, or maybe
• 43:57
  Speaker 2: I didn't try long enough. But I always just base
• 44:00
  Speaker 2: once I did the nose trick, and you have sort
• 44:03
  Speaker 2: of taught your eye, like I said, you can just
• 44:04
  Speaker 2: sort of get it by just sort of unfocusing in
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: the middle distance.
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, that's the way that I do it. Just
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: relax the eyes and let it. Yeah, you just gotta
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: be patient.
• 44:14
  Speaker 2: Gotta be patient.
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: I guess that's it. I think basically everybody should go
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: out and start looking at auto stereograms. Huh.
• 44:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they're not a joke. Nope, they're really neat images
• 44:26
  Speaker 2: are really there?
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the first time, like you were saying, you see
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: one pyrotechnics go off and the final countdown starts playing,
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: it's it's triumphant.
• 44:36
  Speaker 2: It's pretty well you always had the final catin I'm playing,
• 44:38
  Speaker 2: So that's probably what that was.
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: Yes, I do you got anything else?
• 44:42
  Speaker 2: I got nothing else?
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: All right?
• 44:43
  Speaker 2: Everybody?
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: That means, of course, it's time for listener mail.
• 44:48
  Speaker 2: So, my friend, I'm just gonna pick one at random.
• 44:52
  Speaker 2: And when I say randomly select, I mean randomly select
• 44:55
  Speaker 2: from the large pool of people who wrote in about
• 44:58
  Speaker 2: your mask.
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: Oh, we talk about this. I guess I did not
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: see this one.
• 45:06
  Speaker 2: If you remember from the short stuff episode recently on
• 45:09
  Speaker 2: Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion, I even commended you on the
• 45:12
  Speaker 2: show for being brave enough to try public math again
• 45:16
  Speaker 2: and apparently didn't get it right again.
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: Is it really a surprise to anybody though?
• 45:23
  Speaker 2: I don't know, is it?
• 45:25
  Speaker 3: No?
• 45:27
  Speaker 2: Let me see here. Let's go with Jake Eichenberger. Hey, guys,
• 45:32
  Speaker 2: I haven't laughed out loud to myself in a while,
• 45:34
  Speaker 2: but hearing Chuck compliments Josh Bravery with attempting live math
• 45:37
  Speaker 2: really hit the spot. I'm sure you get a lot
• 45:39
  Speaker 2: of emails. But for Celsius to Fahrenheit, you add the
• 45:43
  Speaker 2: thirty two after the multiplication, not before. And I always
• 45:48
  Speaker 2: treat one point eight as diprection nine fifths because five
• 45:52
  Speaker 2: is easy to deal with. So, for instance, for twenty one,
• 45:56
  Speaker 2: I would use twenty plus one because I use the
• 45:58
  Speaker 2: fact that twenty is easily to divide by five to
• 46:00
  Speaker 2: my advantage here. So jeez, now I don't understand any
• 46:06
  Speaker 2: of this, so blah blah blah math stuff. Now add
• 46:10
  Speaker 2: the thirty two they came up with thirty six, So
• 46:13
  Speaker 2: thirty six plus thirty two is sixty eight. And don't
• 46:16
  Speaker 2: forget about the plus one from earlier. Every one degree
• 46:19
  Speaker 2: celsius is one point eight, so sixty eight plus one
• 46:21
  Speaker 2: point eight would be sixty nine point eight as the
• 46:24
  Speaker 2: optimal butterfly temperature.
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I like my version better, even though it produces
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: incorrect results.
• 46:32
  Speaker 2: I mean I wouldn't even have tried it, So hats
• 46:34
  Speaker 2: off to you for that.
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: Thank you, thank you for still commending me, and thank
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: you to uh who.
• 46:38
  Speaker 2: That was just Jake, and let's say all the others.
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: Jake at all, I appreciate you guys for correcting me.
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: Thank you for that. It's been a great day. If
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: you want to get in touch with us, like Jake
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: at All did, you can send us an email. Stuff
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: a production of iHeartRadio.
• 47:04
  Speaker 2: For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
• 47:09
  Speaker 2: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.