Can You Spot the 'Magic Eye' Illusion in This Music Video?

Do you remember those "Magic Eye" books? The ones that if you looked at a scrambled pattern in such a way an image would pop out at you like, well, magic?

A new music video by an indie band shows its own take on this nostalgic artwork.

Image source: YouTube

The band Young Rival recommends watching its "Black Is Good" video in 1080p HD (full screen) and following the instructions presented at the beginning of the film for best results.

Try it out:

If you couldn't see the illusion in this version, check out the "cross-eyed" version:

According to the band's website about the video, what you're seeing is a stereogram, an image that creates an illusion of depth perception.

"These are made on computers, and use subtle changes in a repeating pattern to combine depth information for both eyes into one single image," the band wrote.

In order to see the illusion, the viewer defocuses his or her eyes, "tricking the brain into seeing the slight variations in the repeating pattern as depth information."

The difference between the Magic Eye book images and this project is the video aspect. The creators wrote more about how they transferred the illusion to film:

We collected real-time depth data of Young Rival performing the song using an X-Box Kinect hooked up to a computer. The computer was running software called RGBD toolkit, designed for capturing the depth information from the Kinect using its built-in infrared system. Once we had our depth information, we unpacked it into image sequences and edited these sequences as if they were regular video. The only difference in the editing process was that depth was represented by luminosity. […] With much trial and error, we then ran the data through an algorithm which took each frame of depth information, converted it into a random dot stereogram image, and repacked it into the final video. Lastly, there was one more [color] pass at the end, and voila.

If you couldn't see the magic images in the pattern, check out this version to see what you were missing:

(H/T: Wired)