5 ms·

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

by soco 2y ago

ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
Try on mobile, it's easier if the images are smaller.
- pivo 2y ago
  Wow, yeah it happened immediately for me on mobile while I couldn't get past half way on my monitor. Thanks!
physicles 2y ago
Are you crossing your eyes (focusing nearer than the object) or diverging them (focusing past it)? Diverging is a harder skill to learn.
- soco 2y ago
  Not even sure which one I should try :) but yes tried both to no avail. Maybe it's just not something to achieve in the first try...
  - wruza 2y ago
    For crossing just focus on your finger and then remove it. Looking far away may be harder, and afaik it’s near impossible to look “past infinity”, iow pictures must be less wide than the distance between your eyes. Btw these two methods aren’t equivalent in watching stereograms. If you look at one and see something but it doesn’t really make sense, then it’s probably the opposite chirality. Personally I hate the crossing method because it makes your eyes feel strange for a while.
  - unkulunkulu 2y ago
    how I approached crossing: first practice just crossing your eyes and observing how every object has two images in this case and when you slowly “uncross”, they merge back into one. you can use anything in your surroundings. then for the stereogram you do the same, observe the out of focus edges of the left and right pictures, then slowly uncross until left and right image occupy the same spot as though they were the same object. now its out of focus, but one (ok, actually three, because there were two, you “doubled” that by crossing, then merged two of them. but ignore the other two and focus on the merged pair) sometimes you will merge images of the same picture, in this case you are just back at your normal vision, repeat :) then you try to keep them overlapped and focus the vision, try to “believe” that you are really looking at a single object.
- titzer 2y ago
  Diverging is definitely harder, and might be out of focus. To keep in focus I found it easier to focus on the right image and then cross my eyes, rather than staring in the center and then staring through the screen into the distance while trying to make them line up. I used to not be able to do the "magic eye" 3d images until recently, and this trick is pretty handy.
- biomcgary 2y ago
  Is diverging harder? I find it easier. Maybe it is from long ago practice on stereograms, but I'm curious if it could be due to neurological/physiological differences.
  - grumbel 2y ago
    Crossing is easier because you can simply hold your finger in front of your eyes and look at that for practice. Diverging requires you to look past the image, meaning you have nothing to really look at, which makes it difficult to figure out what your eyes are even supposed to do. Those stereograms aren't helping much either, since they look like nothing until you get it right. With cross-eye you have instant double-vision that you just need to align. Cross-eye also works across much larger distances, diverging fails when the images are too far apart.
  - leni536 2y ago
    It depends on the image. If the two images are too far apart then it could require your eyes to diverge, and not to just converge slightly less. That might be impossible.
  - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
    Diverging is way way easier for me, but I am positive that's because of the 10's of hours (at least) that I spent staring at magic eye images as a child.
- paulsmith 2y ago
  My whole life I've been doing stereograms by diverging, but I couldn't get the three images in the post (the pairs would get closer but never fully overlap), so I tried crossing based on your comment. It was way easier than diverging (obviously, since I couldn't do it otherwise), but it took me a few tries, because I think it's actually /too/ easy to cross your eyes compared to diverging - I was way overshooting when I crossed my eyes. The trick was to notice this, and then control the un-crossing until they lined up.
waffletower 2y ago
That happened to me too but I persisted and eventually succeeded. I think I needed to cross my eyes slightly more than I was initially. I have been diagnosed with a minor eye convergence issue which makes it difficult to focus on near field objects in motion -- gaining this superpower was difficult but I did it without a headache thankfully.
PaulHoule 2y ago
It's like https://triaxes.com/docs/3DTheory-en/522ParallelCrosseyedviewingmetho.html https://triaxes.com/docs/3DTheory-en/522ParallelCrosseyedvie... which some people struggle with, somebody posted a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereogram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereogram to HN yesterday which some people get and others don't. (That's different from the "cross-eyed stereogram" because one of them involves having two images and the other one has one image with two images hidden in it)
- mhitza 2y ago
  I can understand why it's hard for some. I've landed on that wiki page a while ago and couldn't figure it out. Then found a similar thing on an itch.io page that was easier for me to figure out. In these later examples (starting with the easy puzzle of the OP, and your 3d examples), I find that I do the process in two stages. Unfocus my sight until the third image shows up in the middle at the correct size (as a blurry mess). Then try to focus the center image.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    What's more a lot of people (maybe 20%) don't benefit from things like https://www.reald.com/ https://www.reald.com/ which is one reason why stereo movies have struggled. (That plus some people get sick... Having both a flat and 3-d movie in two different theaters comes across as money grubbing to the consumer but it is really a money sink to the theater.)
    - nis251413 2y ago
      Yeah that's me. I lack stereoscopic vision so such tricks or 3d glasses etc do not work.
- tartoran 2y ago
  I have a big problem crossing my eyes too while having no problem with the parallel view way seeing stereograms. I am actually going to stop trying as my eyes started to hurt.
rwmj 2y ago
I spent far too much time as a twenty-something generating autostereograms, which seems to have trained my eyes. I was able to "cross" the images on this page very quickly.
- KPGv2 2y ago
  NB autostereograms require you to move your eyes away from each other, the opposite of crossing them. To put it another way, crossing your eyes is what your eyes do when you're looking at something close to you, while the opposite is when you're looking far away. Which is why for ASGs people advise you to look past the picture. Or why you bring the pic close to your eyes (so close that you basically have no choice but to look beyond the picture)
  - iforgotpassword 2y ago
    You can easily generate inverted ones that require crossing your eyes to appear properly, but they don't look as nice since they pop out instead of going into the screen/book.
  - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
    Ever since I was a child addicted to the "magic eye" stereogram books, I've always diverged (not crossed) my eyes for spot-the-difference puzzles. Also, if you're doing it on a piece of paper, hold a pen in each hand spaced right so you see the middle (3rd) hand in the middle combined image, and move both hands in sync to circle all the differences. Kind of a cool way to point them out to someone else. The difficult puzzle took me about 10 seconds here since I was looking for more than one difference. I saw the first difference in about 1 second.
- antihero 2y ago
  Is that the crossy-eye porn?
  - itishappy 2y ago
    Better known as Magic Eye, but yes.
jeffhuys 2y ago
Don’t CROSS them. Relax them, like you’re tired and can’t focus on a computer screen.
- jeffhuys 2y ago
  Also keep the size low. If you’re having a hard time at 20cm from a 4k 30” monitor, it won’t come easy. Zoom out.
- hk__2 2y ago
  There are two methods, either you cross them either you do like you’re describing.
- arka2147483647 2y ago
  You can actually do it both ways, but which is easiest for whom is different.
- jjk7 2y ago
  It helps me to see the depth and then properly focus to cross them very slightly to start, then as I see the image my eyes adjust to pull it in focus properly.
- emmelaich 2y ago
  Yep, I didn't need to fully cross them. Which is good, because that is painful.
- raffraffraff 2y ago
  I cross them first, then slowly relax them and as the two pupils start to move slowly back out I tell myself that the middle image is further away and "real".
Taek 2y ago
You might be too close to the screen.
Tempat 2y ago
If you mean literally you can only bring them half way together, try just moving twice as far away.
adamc 2y ago
Yeah, me either. My eyes really resist it. And after trying it a few times it messes up my focus for a bit.
lr4444lr 2y ago
Treat it like a "Magic Eye" photo and just relax your eyes to a further focus point.
nadis 2y ago
Same! I feel like I can get a fleeting moment and then it's gone. I swear I could cross my eyes when I was a kid - I wonder if with practice it'll come back or if I'm just old and this skill I didn't-know-I-wanted is lost
smusamashah 2y ago
There is a way to help yourself. Put the pair of images in front of your eyes. Bring your finger between your face and the image. Now look at your finger. Move your finger back and forth. While doing this, notice that at a particular distance, the images in background will perfectly overlap each other. That's your moment. Pull out your finger and look at that image. --- Should take lot less tries to learn doing it without finger. I have taught cross eye to my siblings and cousins using this method. But if you always need finger to focus it's fine.
- thayne 2y ago
  I tried, this, and I can get it to overlap in the background, but as soon as I take my finger away, I lose it.
  - OJFord 2y ago
    You may have a very slightly 'lazy eye' (I do) - it can be a lot less extreme (not at all noticeable to others) than the pointing-completely-different-directions that people imagine, and iirc is highly correlated with astigmatism. Optician used to tell me to work the muscle by following my finger to my nose, trying to maintain a single image. At a certain point it will snap into two - the 'lazy' eye has given up and drifted slightly - the goal is to get the finger as close as possible. Obviously if you get very close or all the way, that's 'cross-eyed', but I just can't do it.
    - rashkov 2y ago
      Same, and I had no idea it was correlated with astigmatism! That does explain my prescription
      - cgriswald 2y ago
        I’m also unable to do this for whatever reason but using a stereoscope works.
  - adriand 2y ago
hgomersall 2y ago
When it works you get what seems like 3 images with the middle one showing the differences; you can then relax and peruse the middle image at will. I guess all the practice with SIRDS as a child probably helps.
loco5niner 2y ago
Here's another trick: open the image in a browser, then zoom out. The smaller the image (up to a point and you can find a sweet spot) the easier it is to get them to overlap. Once you've got it, slowly zoom in a bit at a time, re-acquiring the overlap at each stage.
prashnts 2y ago
What really helped me was doing some sessions with an Orthoptist to reeducate my eyes. I used to see double when stressed sometimes and could never imagine to converge/cross my eyes and retain focus. With the reeducation I was able to see the Impossible one in focus after a couple tries.
- d3VwsX 2y ago
  I had to see an eye doctor at the hospital when I was ~7 and I got to do some exercises, but I never learned to cross my eyes, and then it was like it probably wasn't very important since I did not have to go to the doctor again and no one mentioned it so I just went on with my life and it seems overall like not being able to cross my eyes is not a huge problem. But I guess it may be connected to my complete inability to see 3D effects or figure out how to see anything in the images in the article.
OzFreedom 2y ago
Same as in autostereogram, the trick is to look to the distance. Close your eyes and imagine a mountain far away or some distant object, notice how your eyes adjust to see it. Open your eyes and try to look at this imaginary mountain while the image is in front of you. When you see the third Image, treat it as if its a distant 3d object somewhere on the horizon.
- glxxyz 2y ago
  When I brought an early autostereogram in to school in the early '90s my high school Physics teacher refused to try it as he thought it sounded impossible. He thought we were all in on it as we 'got it' one after another.
Ericson2314 2y ago
That was me at first. I think the "cross eyed" phrase is a bit ambiguous. What I ended up with (I think) is a focal point not closer than the screen but farther than it. My eyes didn't want to do it at first but then they did. What is weird about it is the focusing and focal point are out of sync --- my brain can do it but the weird feeling is one of "gosh, this thing is a lot closer than it should be" where "should be" is based on focal point, and "is a lot closer" is based on focus. Don't want to do this too much, feels like I could easily decalibrate my brain for real life lol.
- nwatson 2y ago
  That focus-farther-than-the-page works (for most people) as long as the distance between the (center of each of the) two images on the page is smaller than your interpupillary distance. In this case the left eye will see the left image, the right eye the right image, in the overlaid resolved image. For most people, having the images resolve in front of the plane of the page such that in resolved overlaid image the right eye sees the left image, and the left eye sees the right image, will work ... and it can work even if the images are farther apart than the interpupillary distance.
  - Ericson2314 2y ago
    Thanks, that is nicely explained --- you finished the thinking I had only started! Are the eyes mechanically capable of pointing outward (so the interpupillary distance is not longer a constraint)? If so, is the problem then neurological not mechanical (brain doesn't want to send signal so they do that)?
- sundarurfriend 2y ago
  This helped me more than any other comment here, but I've still not got them fully overlapping. (Probably just a matter of practice/trials at this point, to be fair.)
hoppp 2y ago
Works for me, I see 3 images if I try hard and the differences pop out
smusamashah 2y ago
I have just figured that using kitchen towel rolls as a binoculars is the easiest way to do a parallel eye on these kind of images. Try that. Hold the rolls like binoculars where right roll is pointing at right image and left is at left image. It's like a DIY VR headset where your brain/eyes only gets two same looking things to focus. No outside noise.

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

by soco 2y ago

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

ThrowawayTestr 2y ago

Try on mobile, it's easier if the images are smaller.

pivo 2y ago
Wow, yeah it happened immediately for me on mobile while I couldn't get past half way on my monitor. Thanks!

physicles 2y ago

Are you crossing your eyes (focusing nearer than the object) or diverging them (focusing past it)? Diverging is a harder skill to learn.

soco 2y ago
Not even sure which one I should try :) but yes tried both to no avail. Maybe it's just not something to achieve in the first try...
- wruza 2y ago
  For crossing just focus on your finger and then remove it. Looking far away may be harder, and afaik it’s near impossible to look “past infinity”, iow pictures must be less wide than the distance between your eyes. Btw these two methods aren’t equivalent in watching stereograms. If you look at one and see something but it doesn’t really make sense, then it’s probably the opposite chirality. Personally I hate the crossing method because it makes your eyes feel strange for a while.
- unkulunkulu 2y ago
  how I approached crossing: first practice just crossing your eyes and observing how every object has two images in this case and when you slowly “uncross”, they merge back into one. you can use anything in your surroundings. then for the stereogram you do the same, observe the out of focus edges of the left and right pictures, then slowly uncross until left and right image occupy the same spot as though they were the same object. now its out of focus, but one (ok, actually three, because there were two, you “doubled” that by crossing, then merged two of them. but ignore the other two and focus on the merged pair) sometimes you will merge images of the same picture, in this case you are just back at your normal vision, repeat :) then you try to keep them overlapped and focus the vision, try to “believe” that you are really looking at a single object.
titzer 2y ago
Diverging is definitely harder, and might be out of focus. To keep in focus I found it easier to focus on the right image and then cross my eyes, rather than staring in the center and then staring through the screen into the distance while trying to make them line up. I used to not be able to do the "magic eye" 3d images until recently, and this trick is pretty handy.
biomcgary 2y ago
Is diverging harder? I find it easier. Maybe it is from long ago practice on stereograms, but I'm curious if it could be due to neurological/physiological differences.
- grumbel 2y ago
  Crossing is easier because you can simply hold your finger in front of your eyes and look at that for practice. Diverging requires you to look past the image, meaning you have nothing to really look at, which makes it difficult to figure out what your eyes are even supposed to do. Those stereograms aren't helping much either, since they look like nothing until you get it right. With cross-eye you have instant double-vision that you just need to align. Cross-eye also works across much larger distances, diverging fails when the images are too far apart.
- leni536 2y ago
  It depends on the image. If the two images are too far apart then it could require your eyes to diverge, and not to just converge slightly less. That might be impossible.
- BenjiWiebe 2y ago
  Diverging is way way easier for me, but I am positive that's because of the 10's of hours (at least) that I spent staring at magic eye images as a child.
paulsmith 2y ago
My whole life I've been doing stereograms by diverging, but I couldn't get the three images in the post (the pairs would get closer but never fully overlap), so I tried crossing based on your comment. It was way easier than diverging (obviously, since I couldn't do it otherwise), but it took me a few tries, because I think it's actually /too/ easy to cross your eyes compared to diverging - I was way overshooting when I crossed my eyes. The trick was to notice this, and then control the un-crossing until they lined up.

waffletower 2y ago

That happened to me too but I persisted and eventually succeeded. I think I needed to cross my eyes slightly more than I was initially. I have been diagnosed with a minor eye convergence issue which makes it difficult to focus on near field objects in motion -- gaining this superpower was difficult but I did it without a headache thankfully.

PaulHoule 2y ago

It's like https://triaxes.com/docs/3DTheory-en/522ParallelCrosseyedviewingmetho.html https://triaxes.com/docs/3DTheory-en/522ParallelCrosseyedvie... which some people struggle with, somebody posted a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereogram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereogram to HN yesterday which some people get and others don't. (That's different from the "cross-eyed stereogram" because one of them involves having two images and the other one has one image with two images hidden in it)

mhitza 2y ago
I can understand why it's hard for some. I've landed on that wiki page a while ago and couldn't figure it out. Then found a similar thing on an itch.io page that was easier for me to figure out. In these later examples (starting with the easy puzzle of the OP, and your 3d examples), I find that I do the process in two stages. Unfocus my sight until the third image shows up in the middle at the correct size (as a blurry mess). Then try to focus the center image.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  What's more a lot of people (maybe 20%) don't benefit from things like https://www.reald.com/ https://www.reald.com/ which is one reason why stereo movies have struggled. (That plus some people get sick... Having both a flat and 3-d movie in two different theaters comes across as money grubbing to the consumer but it is really a money sink to the theater.)
  - nis251413 2y ago
    Yeah that's me. I lack stereoscopic vision so such tricks or 3d glasses etc do not work.
tartoran 2y ago
I have a big problem crossing my eyes too while having no problem with the parallel view way seeing stereograms. I am actually going to stop trying as my eyes started to hurt.

rwmj 2y ago

I spent far too much time as a twenty-something generating autostereograms, which seems to have trained my eyes. I was able to "cross" the images on this page very quickly.

KPGv2 2y ago
NB autostereograms require you to move your eyes away from each other, the opposite of crossing them. To put it another way, crossing your eyes is what your eyes do when you're looking at something close to you, while the opposite is when you're looking far away. Which is why for ASGs people advise you to look past the picture. Or why you bring the pic close to your eyes (so close that you basically have no choice but to look beyond the picture)
- iforgotpassword 2y ago
  You can easily generate inverted ones that require crossing your eyes to appear properly, but they don't look as nice since they pop out instead of going into the screen/book.
- BenjiWiebe 2y ago
  Ever since I was a child addicted to the "magic eye" stereogram books, I've always diverged (not crossed) my eyes for spot-the-difference puzzles. Also, if you're doing it on a piece of paper, hold a pen in each hand spaced right so you see the middle (3rd) hand in the middle combined image, and move both hands in sync to circle all the differences. Kind of a cool way to point them out to someone else. The difficult puzzle took me about 10 seconds here since I was looking for more than one difference. I saw the first difference in about 1 second.
antihero 2y ago
Is that the crossy-eye porn?
- itishappy 2y ago
  Better known as Magic Eye, but yes.

jeffhuys 2y ago

Don’t CROSS them. Relax them, like you’re tired and can’t focus on a computer screen.

jeffhuys 2y ago
Also keep the size low. If you’re having a hard time at 20cm from a 4k 30” monitor, it won’t come easy. Zoom out.
hk__2 2y ago
There are two methods, either you cross them either you do like you’re describing.
arka2147483647 2y ago
You can actually do it both ways, but which is easiest for whom is different.
jjk7 2y ago
It helps me to see the depth and then properly focus to cross them very slightly to start, then as I see the image my eyes adjust to pull it in focus properly.
emmelaich 2y ago
Yep, I didn't need to fully cross them. Which is good, because that is painful.
raffraffraff 2y ago
I cross them first, then slowly relax them and as the two pupils start to move slowly back out I tell myself that the middle image is further away and "real".

Taek 2y ago

You might be too close to the screen.

Tempat 2y ago

If you mean literally you can only bring them half way together, try just moving twice as far away.

adamc 2y ago

Yeah, me either. My eyes really resist it. And after trying it a few times it messes up my focus for a bit.

lr4444lr 2y ago

Treat it like a "Magic Eye" photo and just relax your eyes to a further focus point.

nadis 2y ago

Same! I feel like I can get a fleeting moment and then it's gone. I swear I could cross my eyes when I was a kid - I wonder if with practice it'll come back or if I'm just old and this skill I didn't-know-I-wanted is lost

smusamashah 2y ago

There is a way to help yourself. Put the pair of images in front of your eyes. Bring your finger between your face and the image. Now look at your finger. Move your finger back and forth. While doing this, notice that at a particular distance, the images in background will perfectly overlap each other. That's your moment. Pull out your finger and look at that image. --- Should take lot less tries to learn doing it without finger. I have taught cross eye to my siblings and cousins using this method. But if you always need finger to focus it's fine.

thayne 2y ago
I tried, this, and I can get it to overlap in the background, but as soon as I take my finger away, I lose it.
- OJFord 2y ago
  You may have a very slightly 'lazy eye' (I do) - it can be a lot less extreme (not at all noticeable to others) than the pointing-completely-different-directions that people imagine, and iirc is highly correlated with astigmatism. Optician used to tell me to work the muscle by following my finger to my nose, trying to maintain a single image. At a certain point it will snap into two - the 'lazy' eye has given up and drifted slightly - the goal is to get the finger as close as possible. Obviously if you get very close or all the way, that's 'cross-eyed', but I just can't do it.
  - rashkov 2y ago
    Same, and I had no idea it was correlated with astigmatism! That does explain my prescription
    - cgriswald 2y ago
      I’m also unable to do this for whatever reason but using a stereoscope works.
- adriand 2y ago

hgomersall 2y ago

When it works you get what seems like 3 images with the middle one showing the differences; you can then relax and peruse the middle image at will. I guess all the practice with SIRDS as a child probably helps.

loco5niner 2y ago

Here's another trick: open the image in a browser, then zoom out. The smaller the image (up to a point and you can find a sweet spot) the easier it is to get them to overlap. Once you've got it, slowly zoom in a bit at a time, re-acquiring the overlap at each stage.

prashnts 2y ago

What really helped me was doing some sessions with an Orthoptist to reeducate my eyes. I used to see double when stressed sometimes and could never imagine to converge/cross my eyes and retain focus. With the reeducation I was able to see the Impossible one in focus after a couple tries.

d3VwsX 2y ago
I had to see an eye doctor at the hospital when I was ~7 and I got to do some exercises, but I never learned to cross my eyes, and then it was like it probably wasn't very important since I did not have to go to the doctor again and no one mentioned it so I just went on with my life and it seems overall like not being able to cross my eyes is not a huge problem. But I guess it may be connected to my complete inability to see 3D effects or figure out how to see anything in the images in the article.

OzFreedom 2y ago

Same as in autostereogram, the trick is to look to the distance. Close your eyes and imagine a mountain far away or some distant object, notice how your eyes adjust to see it. Open your eyes and try to look at this imaginary mountain while the image is in front of you. When you see the third Image, treat it as if its a distant 3d object somewhere on the horizon.

glxxyz 2y ago
When I brought an early autostereogram in to school in the early '90s my high school Physics teacher refused to try it as he thought it sounded impossible. He thought we were all in on it as we 'got it' one after another.

Ericson2314 2y ago

That was me at first. I think the "cross eyed" phrase is a bit ambiguous. What I ended up with (I think) is a focal point not closer than the screen but farther than it. My eyes didn't want to do it at first but then they did. What is weird about it is the focusing and focal point are out of sync --- my brain can do it but the weird feeling is one of "gosh, this thing is a lot closer than it should be" where "should be" is based on focal point, and "is a lot closer" is based on focus. Don't want to do this too much, feels like I could easily decalibrate my brain for real life lol.

nwatson 2y ago
That focus-farther-than-the-page works (for most people) as long as the distance between the (center of each of the) two images on the page is smaller than your interpupillary distance. In this case the left eye will see the left image, the right eye the right image, in the overlaid resolved image. For most people, having the images resolve in front of the plane of the page such that in resolved overlaid image the right eye sees the left image, and the left eye sees the right image, will work ... and it can work even if the images are farther apart than the interpupillary distance.
- Ericson2314 2y ago
  Thanks, that is nicely explained --- you finished the thinking I had only started! Are the eyes mechanically capable of pointing outward (so the interpupillary distance is not longer a constraint)? If so, is the problem then neurological not mechanical (brain doesn't want to send signal so they do that)?
sundarurfriend 2y ago
This helped me more than any other comment here, but I've still not got them fully overlapping. (Probably just a matter of practice/trials at this point, to be fair.)

hoppp 2y ago

Works for me, I see 3 images if I try hard and the differences pop out

smusamashah 2y ago

I have just figured that using kitchen towel rolls as a binoculars is the easiest way to do a parallel eye on these kind of images. Try that. Hold the rolls like binoculars where right roll is pointing at right image and left is at left image. It's like a DIY VR headset where your brain/eyes only gets two same looking things to focus. No outside noise.