I've Acquired a New Superpower

>Probably my peak fame right there.

My son and I always make jokes about everyone's 5 minutes of fame. Some random person on the jumbotron at a sporting event "Yup, there's his moment, it's over now."

At least yours got you something ;)

I can't overlap the images to save my life - they get like halfway there and that's it...

Just got a funny visual of someone going crosseyed and focused on overcoming a challenge in front of them, with a crowd of people cheering them on.

To reduce eye strain, don’t cross your eyes, but relax them (so, the other way). Instantly clear and snaps together as if magnetic.

I'm great at magic eyes / stereograms and have a ton of posters around my house with them, but I still had trouble with seeing the differences in the test images. I easily locked in my focus on the overlapping cat images but only one difference stood out to me.

As a kid, I got a Magic Eye book and learned to see it by crossing my eyes (ie, focusing in front of the screen). I thought it was pretty interesting when I realized that I was seeing all the images inverted ("peaks" were "valleys" and vice versa) due to the way I was focusing. Alas, I never was able to see the images "correctly".

I have a slightly lazy right eye, so this has always come naturally to me, but I will say it's considerably easier to achieve the false focal lock on printed material— something about screens, even quality ones with high refresh rates, just isn't the same.

Maybe we are the opposite. As a kid, I could only do cross-eyed-focus-in-front-of-screen, but not "focus beyond the screen". Or a book at the time.

So I was able to see the 3D in Magic Eyes, but the 3D effect was inverted.

Today as an adult I am able to focus beyond the screen, but it's still much easier for me to do it cross-eyed.

I also got all the images in the post almost right away. But my eyeballs focused in front instead > _ <

I’ve done Magic Eyes a lot, but I’m failing on this. (However, I found the difference in the coffee beans picture reasonably fast without the eye-crossing trick, and before reading what the difference is.)

I can get the images to merge but the differences don't stand out.

This happens to me easily inside cars with these dotted-breathing roof interior patterns. (Edit: g “perforated vinyl fabric”)

Well, worse than easily - sometimes I cannot get back to normal and am not sure how far it actually is, because the nature of the pattern allows to re-lock at every few cm. I just don’t know where I’m really looking at unless there’s an irregular object nearby.

This happens to me too. Particularly when it's on a narrow horizontal repetition (like wooden slats on a wall).

I attribute mine to playing a lot of the game Magic Carpet from the mid to late 90's. It had some interesting graphics modes, including Red/Blue anaglyph 3D and a stereogram 3D mode. It was fun to try to play it, but it used noise for the pattern, so you didn't get textures, only blobby shapes.

I find that there are different techniques to seeing both.

If I stare at the image and cross my eyes until focus lock I get crossview where the image goes back into the page.

If I bring the image right up to my eyes and stare through it into the distance, then slowly move the image backwards into my gaze until I get focus lock, then I get parallel view where the image pops out of the page.

I have always wondered the difference between the two and why it happens. Thanks for shedding some light on it :)

EDIT: I have just managed to achieve both without moving my head or the image for the first time in my life! Just by trying to look further 'past' the picture into the distance, and then by slightly crossing my eyes and focussing at a point in front of the picture.

I have been trying to do this for 30 years, and it is only your explanation which helped me to do it. Thanks so much!

I can do both pretty comfortably, but there’s a definite bias to parallel, way easier for me.

Note that for parallel viewing the left edges (or centers) of the images should not be farther apart than your own eye spacing aka interpupillary distance (IPD) sometimes just called PD.

That imgur may need to be shrunk depending on your screen for parallel to work.

All it did was hurt my eyes. I'll opt out of playing, superpower be damned.

For spot-the-difference, crossing your eyes is more effective and easier to "dial in" than uncrossing them. You're essentially making each eye look at the opposite image. If you try uncrossing, then you need to make sure the images are at the exact correct distance to cause them to overlap with that technique, because you can only uncross your eyes enough to look straight ahead.

While intuitive, I’m not so sure. I look at the center line and slowly cross my eyes until the 3rd image slides into place and then I get focus lock. At no time do I feel my eyes uncross and go the other way. Hmm!

Both work equally well if you just want to spot differences. Cross-eyed view is somewhat easier to do, since people naturally cross their eyes when looking at something close to their face, but there is no natural reason for one’s eyes to diverge. But cross-eyed view also gives a subjectively smaller image, and is also not the usual way autostereograms are made to be seen.

See my other comment about cross view vs parallel view, looks like you can do one vs the other and the author can do the opposite.

I can’t parse your second sentence.

Hmm. I noticed in lectures, if I stilled my eyes, most of the field of view would grey out, except for areas of motion (eg a lecturer's head or writing arm) which appeared normal. After motion stopped in an area, it would slowly grey out. When a motion started, its area would snap to normal, making it easy to spot onsets of motion. Eventually my eyes would twitch, and the whole field would refresh.

That seems like not the same thing though, right? You're not doing a diff on two images, you're just losing resolution so you can direct more attention to movement.