Tyler had studied under Béla Julesz, a famed neuroscientist known for his research of the human brain’s visual system. “I asked him where I could buy one of the cameras, and he pointed me to a magazine called Stereo World.” Baccei picked up the next issue, and that’s where he came across a story about autostereograms, a little-known perceptual concept invented in the 1970s by visual neuroscientist Christopher Tyler. Baccei found himself intrigued by the idea of three-dimensional photographs. As fate would have it, this mime, whose real name is Ron Labbe, was also a 3-D photography enthusiast and had brought along one of his stereo cameras. Baccei wrote the copy and hired a photographer and a pantomimist who would star in the shoot. “It was a play on the phrase ‘chairman of the board,’” he recalled, chuckling at his old idea.
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At the time, Pentica was looking to boost sales in the United States for a product called the MIME in-circuit emulator, and it was up to Baccei to create an advertisement to run in a national trade magazine.īaccei came up with a concept in which a mime would stand at the end of a conference table, his arm digitally altered to appear as if it were plugged into a series of wires that connected to a computer. manager of Pentica Systems, a British company that sold in-circuit emulators, small devices that were used to debug early computers.
At the start of the ’90s, Baccei was working as the U.S. The story of Magic Eye begins at a technology company in a quiet office park outside of Boston. They follow the bounces and try to keep ahead of them as much as they can.” Image courtesy of Ron Labbe/Studio 3D “The most successful people understand that and they don’t try to force the game. “Life is a real pinball machine,” he continued. “It was the right place at the right time,” he said recently, speaking from his home in Vermont.īut in the more than 25 years since Magic Eye first hit bookstore shelves, the 74-year-old, self-styled retired hippie has come to learn a lot about what happens when you follow the unexpected bends in the road when they come your way. To be honest, he finds the whole thing just as curious as you do. “Fads have a predictable life,” says Tom Baccei, who would know better than anyone.Īs the man behind Magic Eye, Baccei and his small team of designers orchestrated one of pop culture’s most bewildering whims, turning an obscure perceptual experiment into a publishing empire.
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Every illusion is solvable, as long as you know how to look at it.įor a time, people were obsessed with the visual trickery of not being able to see what was directly in front of them.
The others who crowded around (there were always others) passed along tips like an unsuccessful game of telephone- Cross your eyes. To find the secret image, people adopted a signature Magic Eye stance: bent forward, hands-on-hips, staring-dumbfounded-at the visual static in front of them. The fact that it was so difficult to see the 3-D shape hiding behind the hypercolored patterns was a major part of its appeal.
Magic Eye was something of a paradox: a deliberate graphic mess that relied on grids and precision to achieve its intended effect. Books with taglines like “A new way of looking at the world,” lined and then disappeared from store shelves as people snatched up more than 20 million copies of the series. Posters bearing the brightly colored op-art hung from the walls of Midwestern mall kiosks. It was originally published in issue #02 of Eye on Design magazine.įor a flash in the 1990s, Magic Eye, the world’s most famous-and infamously frustrating-optical illusion, was everywhere. This story is part of our Weekend Reads series, where we highlight a story we love from the archives.
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