Fred's Book Club: Now You See It.

Welcome once again to the Humpback Writers series, our Wednesday "Hump Day" book feature, where we have a look at all kinds of books. Do the writers actually have humps? No, we believe they do not. In fact, sometimes the books don't even have writers, as is the case today.

Remember these?

Yes, it's the amazing, dazzling 3-D adventure, the Magic Eye! "Stare into these seemingly abstract fields of color (no funny glasses required), and an enchanting 3D image will materialize, all from an abstract, seemingly random field of color!" Or so says the book flap, one of the few bits of the book that really contain writing. 

The trick of the thing is the so-called Salinsky Dot, an image-rendering system that can hide a picture within a picture. There's not a lot of explanation beyond that in the book. To get more information, we can look at a 2019 interview with Magic Eye founder Tom Baccei from AIGA's Eye on Design. It explains some of how the phenomenon works, as developed from research on human's binocular vision: "In the 1960s, [neuroscientist Béla Julesz] pioneered the concept of the random dot stereogram, a visual trick that shows how humans can achieve the sensation of stereopsis, or 3-D vision, by looking at a pair of 2D images filled with randomized, black-and-white dots." Baccei's research into this phenomenon led to the founding of Magic Eye. 

I'm a little reluctant to give true examples from the books, since they're still in print and under copyright. Nor do I want to give away a lot of the answers; half the fun of doing this is discovering what the secret hidden image is. But to give you an idea: Some, like this page, just turn the image you see into a three-dimensional version of the same...

3-D money

While others contain a hidden image you have to look into to perceive.

There's a motorcycle in here somewhere

I'm not sure if you can get the 3-D image from my posted examples, but you can from the Magic Eye Web site (as noted below). 

The books were a craze in the '90s. The ones I have were published by Andrews McMeel in 1993 and 1994, and there were more. According to the Andrews McMeel site, "Magic Eye I, II, and III appeared on the New York Times best-seller list for a combined 73 weeks." More than 20 million copies were sold. And then it went away, or at least fell from the public's -- eye.

As fads go, this was better than most. Maybe the Hula-Hoop was healthier, and the Pet Rock was funnier, and the Fidget Spinner more . . . fidgety, but Magic Eye was more scientific. Plus, it was a lesson in relaxation. To make it work, according to the first book, you should "let the eyes relax, and stare vacantly off into space, as if looking through the image.... Relax and become comfortable with the idea of observing the image, without looking at it." No wonder I sucked at it when I first tried it. It required relaxation, and I spent my entire youth as a nervous wreck. Pretty much true now, too, actually. 

Magic Eye is still around. If you want to try your luck on getting the 3-D image to show, go to the Magic Eye Web site. The image works on the browser almost as well as on printed paper. You can find an instructional page here. 

In addition to its own books, Magic Eye has made books with themes like Harry Potter and Spider-Man. The crew now uses the Magic Eye technology for advertising and promotions as well. There was even a Magic Eye necktie, if you don't mind people staring at your chest with weird, dilated eyes.  

These two books in my collection actually belonged to my mom. She thought it was the most incredible thing. Well, maybe not, but it's not bad.