![]() ![]() Hard to believe? That’s why it’s such a potent illusion! You wise up to it only after you get there and the harm is done. You could be level with that lower hilltop, yet think you’re high enough to glide down to it and pass over. The high background will make any foreground appear lower than it is. Picture a big mountain miles ahead and a lower one half as far. In soaring, there’s one illusion that can lure you into high ground lower than you realize until you arrive. (Hint: It's a woman and she has blond hair.The problem with illusions is, you need to know they exist to know you’re deceived by them, and by then it might be too late. I sat at my kitchen table 45 minutes before I could see it." I'm not going to tell them I tell them they've got to get it themselves. They call and beg me to tell them what it is. "We've gotten thousands of calls about that picture," says marketing representative Juanita Albert. "He takes it well, though he says he views it as small potatoes in the scope of human history."Īlthough the books of 3-D images all have cheat sheets-a page that shows what you're supposed to be seeing-one picture in "Holusion Art" just shows a large question mark. "He's one of the brightest people on earth, a graduate student at Northwestern, outstanding among intellectuals, and he has not gotten one," Malloy says. One of the employees in Molloy's Evanston art store still hasn't seen any the hidden images. "All of a sudden, the man started cussing and stomping his feet and then they stormed out. "We had an older couple in here last Christmas, and they must have stood in front of one of our pictures for an hour," says Karen Kuchta of Deck the Walls, a store in the Fox Valley Shopping Mall in Aurora. ![]() Thing Enterprises, will be coming out with a whole new line of Christmas products. They are all $12.95, and published by Andrews and McMeel in Kansas City. "Magic Eye Two" has sold 1.2 million copies and "Magic Eye Three," which will be out this month, has a first run of 1 million. His first book of 3-D pictures, "Magic Eye," is now in its fifth printing and has sold more than 1.5 million copies. "Only fools plan for this kind of success." but I never knew it would be this wildly successful," he says. So I built my own program to do these pictures. "I thought this was the greatest thing I'd ever heard of, and I figured if I liked it, so would other people. Likewise, Boston's Tom Baccei, 50, who describes himself as a "techno-nerd hippie neocapitalist," stumbled upon a trade magazine article in 1990 about the single dot stereogram technique-the name for the computer-generated pictures. Prices for the prints range from $10 to $22 NVision also has sold 100,000 copies of a $15.99 book called "Holusion Art," which contains 20 of the 3-D pictures. "Last year we sold 2.5 million prints around the world," Kersen said recently in a telephone interview. Kersen became vice president of marketing in 1993, and has managed to get over the annoyance of the "parlor trick" at his wedding. They patented their particular technique, calling it Holusion, and incorporated into a company called NVision Grafix, which now has 30 employees. In early 1993, the two friends, now 29, quit their jobs and went into the 3-D art business full time. They sold out almost immediately, and ordered another 1,000. He went to California on business for LTV, and the company store there ordered 100 of the prints. Herber started selling the prints out of the back of his car, before work and during lunchtime. It seemed like everyone could see it except me. It was like a parlor trick, and I wasn't all that amused. "It was this little 4-by-6 picture with lots of numbers, and everyone was sitting around at the reception, playing with it. "I was getting married, and Mike brought a prototype (of the poster) to the wedding," says Steven Kersen, a college buddy of Bielinski and Herber. It was a neat gimmick, they thought-a picture that wasn't easily seen of an airplane that couldn't be picked up on radar. Look at it in a certain way, however, and the bomber popped out. The result was a picture of thousands of tiny dots. Herber showed Bielinski, a former fraternity brother, some three-dimensional sketches of the B-2 Stealth Bomber, and the two decided to fiddle around with the sketches on the computer. Bielinski was a computer whiz kid and Herber was an engineer working for LTV Corp. Michael Bielinski and Paul Herber of Texas started making the pictures in 1991, almost as a fluke. ![]()
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