And on another note
Magic Eye pictures used to fascinate me. Seeing the embedded image was fairly easy, it required "relaxing" the eyes and tricking the brain into thinking that you were focused on one column of repeating images, when in reality, each eye focused on adjacent columns.
Finding it fairly easy to do this, I upped the challenge. What happens if you go backwards, crossing your eyes to focus your left eye on a column to the right of the one viewed by your right eye. Poof! The image appears again, but inverted this time: the background of the image (that previously was infinitely far away, is suddenly infinitely near). It was a bit of a trip.
What else?
Well, if you can focus on columns adjacent to one another, why not separate the columns by a third column. So that neither eye is actually focusing on the central column. How many levels of focus/inversion could I find? Usually, the second level of relaxation was tough, but I could get 4 or 5 levels of inversion (I figured out eye-crossing at an early age).
Now, I sometimes repeat this with non-magic-eye repeating patterns. A tiled wall is an ideal focal point, and I've exercised my eyes to the point where I can focus on points 8 inches apart at a distance of 4 feet. Clearly, this goes beyond the point of "looking past" the image (the magic-eye trick) since a focal point at infinite distance would result in parallel lines of sight only 2-3 inches apart (the distance between ones eyes).
I wonder, does anyone else do this? Is this exercise of my eyes good for their long-term health, detrimental, or completely neutral? How do the receptors in my brain interpret the distance of an "object" when my eyes diverge by 12 degrees to focus on it?
Finding it fairly easy to do this, I upped the challenge. What happens if you go backwards, crossing your eyes to focus your left eye on a column to the right of the one viewed by your right eye. Poof! The image appears again, but inverted this time: the background of the image (that previously was infinitely far away, is suddenly infinitely near). It was a bit of a trip.
What else?
Well, if you can focus on columns adjacent to one another, why not separate the columns by a third column. So that neither eye is actually focusing on the central column. How many levels of focus/inversion could I find? Usually, the second level of relaxation was tough, but I could get 4 or 5 levels of inversion (I figured out eye-crossing at an early age).
Now, I sometimes repeat this with non-magic-eye repeating patterns. A tiled wall is an ideal focal point, and I've exercised my eyes to the point where I can focus on points 8 inches apart at a distance of 4 feet. Clearly, this goes beyond the point of "looking past" the image (the magic-eye trick) since a focal point at infinite distance would result in parallel lines of sight only 2-3 inches apart (the distance between ones eyes).
I wonder, does anyone else do this? Is this exercise of my eyes good for their long-term health, detrimental, or completely neutral? How do the receptors in my brain interpret the distance of an "object" when my eyes diverge by 12 degrees to focus on it?