My time has come!

The above stereographic image is for cross-eyed viewing (most stereograms are wall-eyed, so you may need to put your finger in front of your screen until this one comes into focus)

This is an image of Honolulu, Hawaii, published by NASA. Note Diamond Head (the volcanic crater) in the south.

Here are some other stereopairs published by JPL:


Wheeler Ridge, California


Mount Saint Helens


Salt Lake Valley, Utah


Wellington, New Zealand

  • @[email protected]
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    1913 days ago

    Not sure why but those NEVER work for me lol

    Not this, not magic eye books, absolutely nothing works.

    Tried for many hours back in the day

    • @[email protected]
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      1013 days ago

      I can only do parallel-view, not crosseyed, those look so surreal that way (inverted height/depth basically)

      • CoopaLoopa
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        12 days ago

        Works opposite for me. Cross-eyed versions look correct, and the parallel/wall versions have inverted depth.

        Same thing with magic eye images, they’re always inverted, like I’m looking into a mold of what the object is supposed to be.

      • @[email protected]
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        612 days ago

        Is that why I’m seeing things that way? Don’t understand the difference really, but is really odd to see Mt St Helens as a sinkhole instead.

        • @[email protected]
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          412 days ago

          Yupp, I never got the hang of cross-eyed viewing, even with the tips that are around, whereas the “looking through the image” technique is super easy for me, basically just relaxing my eyes. I assume there’s people where it is the other way around, and the cross-eyed method works better for them.

          Basically it’s about which image is transferred as information from which of your eyes, and the two different techniques swap the eyes, which also swaps the 3D depth information.

          I love the Wellington here viewed the “wrong” way - like the ocean is a massive plateau surrounding the coast, with that strip of developed area rising like another giant wall.

    • @[email protected]
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      513 days ago

      I tried so long I tried every method, never worked for me. Then eventually I found an image that made it work for me

      https://i.redd.it/25c330mmohu51.jpg

      (Sorry for the Reddit link). How I do it: put your phone screen right before your nose and unfocus your eyes. Then, don’t move your eyes, don’t move your focus, but slowly move the phone away from your face. At about 10-20cm distance, you should be able to see a squirrel with a nut in its hands.

      After that it became very easy to do other pictures simply by knowing what to expect (an actual 3d image).

      That being said the one above is really hard.

    • Angry_Autist (he/him)
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      412 days ago

      If you have astigmatism or greatly different lens prescriptions per eye, it may be very hard for it to work.

      If you do have astigmatism, you can kind of ‘squeeze’ or scrunch your eyelids down to compensate as you cross your eyes, and it may work better without glasses and closer up

      Some people it just never works with

    • @[email protected]
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      112 days ago

      Do you happen to have a dominant eye? If you primarily use one eye over the other I dont believe these work. For me, I have a scar in the middle of one eye that prevents most straight ahead vision, so its only used to add peripheral information.

  • @[email protected]
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    13 days ago

    About 21 years ago (😩) I made a stereoscopic photo for some online contest. I was pretty proud of it.

    Edit: please ignore the fact that the light doesn’t match between the shots!

    • @[email protected]
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      413 days ago

      I remember my HP IPAQ, it was my first mobile computing device. That thing was so much fun.

      • @[email protected]
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        112 days ago

        I was mildly obsessed. It felt like the future! I miss technology like that. I’m kinda excited for all this AR stuff people are talking about because I haven’t really been excited by the latest and greatest shiny black rectangle in a long time.

    • Lojcs
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      212 days ago

      It is a good one. Although my eyes kept trying to focus on the keyboad and failing

  • @[email protected]
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    13 days ago

    These are all backwards. The eyes are reversed so everything that’s supposed to be a hole looks like a bump and vice-versa.

    EDIT : TIL about cross v wall eyed. I dont understand why they would do it this way though ? The image is much less stable, and moving it at all completely breaks the effect. Wall-eyed really allows you to move and observe details without breaking.

    • @[email protected]
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      613 days ago

      For a lot of people cross eyed views are easier, they would probably give similar complaints for a wall eyed view. It depends a lot on how your eye muscles behave

    • @[email protected]OP
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      713 days ago

      You’re doing “wall eyed” viewing. These are for “cross-eyed” viewing. “Wall-eyed” means your eyes are focusing at a point behind the image. You need to cross your eyes for these. Try putting your finger in between your screen and your eyes, varying the distance until the dots merge. Then, remove your finger, focusing on the image itself. That should allow for cross-eyed viewing.

      • @[email protected]
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        212 days ago

        Ahhhh this doesn’t work on phones? I also did Wall eyed, works quite easy but the cross eyed hurts lol.

        • @[email protected]OP
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          112 days ago

          Hmm, I mean, it works fine for me, but I’ve been viewing stereo images for 15 years, both wall- and cross-eyed, so YMMV. I’ll see if I can quickly edit together some wall-eyed versions of the images for y’all.

          • @[email protected]
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            112 days ago

            Yeah my eyes are prolly not used to crossing or something. When trying the finger thing to cross and merge the dots in the middle, it does works but it hurts to much to keep it stable. Will give it a shot on my PC later. I did toy a lot with wall-eyed ones years ago, so I intuitively started doing that until I noticed a lake on top of a hill in the third one :')

        • @[email protected]
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          112 days ago

          Yes it does work on phones, but it also works on computers. Stop being a peasant and buy a computer.

      • @[email protected]
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        412 days ago

        Focusing at a point behind the image is exactly what we’ve always done for every other magic eye poster because it only requires relaxing your eyes (staring off into the distance) for the image to pop into focus. Cross eyed viewing is damn near impossible on any screen at less than an arm’s length away without significant eye strain or external devices (like the stereoscopic viewers that photogrammetrists would use to view these kinds of images without inducing a migraine) and since the dot is on top holding a finger up as a guide ends up obstructing the entire view unless your arms are growing out of your forehead. The wall eyed view has none of these issues.

        I appreciate the post and your effort. But, the images themselves are frustrating and have killed my initial reaction, which was to share them further. Because I’m nearly the only person I know that wouldn’t loose interest in the explanation for “correct viewing” half way through. If they were wall eyed stereoscopic images, I could just say “Magic Eye”, they’d remember Mallrats, see the schooner, and go “Ooh neat.”

    • @[email protected]
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      1213 days ago

      I can still view these, but it’s much much harder for me.

      I don’t know why parallel isn’t the default.

      • Maestro
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        1213 days ago

        It varies per person. I for one can’t view wall-eyed, only cross-eyed.

          • @[email protected]
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            513 days ago

            Also can’t do parallel, only cross view. I only have to use effort for the first few seconds, as soon as the two images are aligned, my focus snaps to it and I can relax and keep the focus without having to think about it.

            It does cause some mild strain if I’m doing it for too long (like going through a book of these), but if I’m cross-eyed for a just a couple of minutes its no problem.

            • @[email protected]
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              13 days ago

              Huh. For me I can very easily wall-eye, I just let my focus drift. Going cross-eyed requires serious and constant strain, and doing the trick with my finger in front of the screen doesn’t work – I can get the dots aligned but if I try to focus on the screen or move my finger I lose it instantly.

        • vaguerant
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          413 days ago

          Same here basically, cross-eyed viewing is super easy for me but I have to work for minutes to perform wall-eyed viewing. I was really excited to see a post with cross-eyed stereograms.

      • AnyOldName3
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        613 days ago

        Lots of people can really easily go cross-eyed and look at these with no practice whatsoever. Fewer people can do the parallel kind with no practice or with the amount of practice they’ve already done.

      • moonlight
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        213 days ago

        Cross eyed is so much more uncomfortable. It also looks smaller than parallel to me.

        • ddh
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          112 days ago

          Parallel are the ones where you put the image between you and your point of focus, instead of your point of focus being between you and the image.

          • Owl
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            112 days ago

            That seems hard to do

            I’ve tried it (to get reverse-depth) and didn’t manage to…

    • @[email protected]
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      613 days ago

      I grew up with the Magic Eye books and have never been able to do cross-view as a result.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      13 days ago

      If you want wall-eyed viewing, you can just download the image and mirror flip swap it in an image editor. I also personally prefer wall-eyed viewing.

      This is exactly how JPL posted them, and they did cross-eyed viewing because the image jumps out of the page, rather than in (I presume).

    • @[email protected]
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      313 days ago

      I can never get the parallel view to work. My eyes want to focus too quickly. :( cross view is so much easier to me. I wish they came in both all the time.

  • @[email protected]OP
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    12 days ago

    Since some people are apparently rather salty about these being cross-eyed, despite the fact that that’s just how NASA made them, here, special for y’all, a selection:

    • @[email protected]
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      12 days ago

      These ones are… different. When I use these ones the mountain ridges appear to dip inwards? Away from the screen. This was not the case for the ones in the main post

      EDIT: I figured out the reason: i’m still going cross-eyed to view them. In the cross-eyed ones, you are taking the left image in the right eye and the right image in the left eye, but in the wall-eyed one you are supposed to take them in reverse. So if you look at the wall-eyed one cross-eyed, the depths are going to all be reversed for you.

      EDIT 2: to get the wall-eyed ones to work correctly, I had get a piece of mail and physically seperate my eyes from one another with it. The sensation of going wall-eyed was exactly the same as crossing my eyes, but the results were now correct.

    • @[email protected]
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      611 days ago

      Thank you so much! This is so much easier for me.

      I wasn’t going to complain or anything, but this post made me realize that I’m actually incapable of viewing cross-eyed. It actually hurt my eye sockets to try.

      • @[email protected]OP
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        311 days ago

        I also personally prefer wall-eyed viewing, but these just happened to be cross-eyed originally, so I was surprised by the complaints.

    • @[email protected]
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      12 days ago

      Thanks. These are cross-eyed, not the originals. The originals viewed with crossed eyes all made holes out of the mountains.

      • @[email protected]OP
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        12 days ago

        Allow me to word it differently: people are salty that the originals posted above are Cross-eyed, so these are wall-eyed (like I said in the image itself.

        The images in the top-level comment are distinctly not for cross-eyed viewing, since the originals were cross-eyed.

        • @[email protected]
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          312 days ago

          When I view the originals cross-eyed, I see all the mountains as holes in the ground. I’m sure that’s not the intended effect. Try it!

          • @[email protected]OP
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            512 days ago

            Define “Cross-eyed”. I get the impression that your definition is not the same as mine. Cross-eyed viewing is specifically shifting your eyes so that they would be focused on an object closer to you than your screen. Wall-eyed viewing is the term used for shifting your eyes so they would be focused on an object behind your screen. The originals above, as the text in the original NASA photos says, require you to cross your eyes. The images I have posted in this top-level comment require you to look through the screen at the wall. I don’t know what else to tell you. You’re just wrong. I’ve been doing this for fifteen years. The US Government has been doing it since the second world war. I think that, given that the current administration is made up entirely of cross-eyed imbeciles, we can probably take their word for it that something is cross-eyed?

            But, since just telling you to read the things I have already posted didn’t work last time, take a look at the difference between the CrossView and Parallel Viewing (wall-eyed) communities here on Lemmy. If you still don’t believe me, I cannot help you.

            • @[email protected]
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              412 days ago

              I know the definitions. The cross-eyed method is way easier for me than the wall-eyed one. It’s not that I don’t want to believe you, friend. I’m just reporting what I saw. Did you check the picks yourself with both methods? I did.

              • @[email protected]OP
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                412 days ago

                Yes, I made the second set. I have been looking at the originals since I found them months ago. Here, let’s do a test. jmol generated this image as “cross-eyed”. Do you agree?

                • @[email protected]
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                  112 days ago

                  This works perfectly for me with the cross-eyed approach, yes.

                  No disrespect meant when I asked if you tested your pictures. You know, it IS possible to swich the pictutes without testing, so it made sense to ask.

                  Thanks for being patient and troubleshooting my apparent viewing anomaly.

    • @[email protected]
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      29 days ago

      Haha sick, so cool. This is so much cooler than the old school stereograms with like a silhouet hiding in an image. How did you make these?

      Idk why I can’t do the cross-eyed, still wanna see if I can get that working as well

      • @[email protected]OP
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        9 days ago

        These images were created by NASA, though you can make your own by taking two pictures about 4-5 inches apart. Try going to the Parallel View community to see more.

        Also, if you know what JMOL is (a molecule viewer), you can make it show you things in stereo by right-clicking, then clicking, iirc, “scheme”–>“stereographic” or “3D”–>“wall-eyed”

  • @[email protected]
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    12 days ago

    In feudal Japon, 19th century, a photographer made a lot of photos from the people in 3D to use in a viewer, hand colored.

    (Converted to gif, to see the 3D effect without eye acrobatics)

  • @[email protected]
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    812 days ago

    Really can’t seem to understand how this works.

    Never did any “magic eyes” or whatever books as a kid, so maybe I just don’t have any practice in this, but whether I try to cross my eyes focusing beyond the screen, or “above” the screen, I can’t get the resulting middle image to look like anything other than a blur.

    Perhaps my eyes are somehow odd on the other hand. I don’t need glasses though, so I’m a bit skeptical that’s it.

    I tried all the guides I found in this thread, including the floating hot dogs, attempting varying distances both with the screen and the finger, then trying the wall-eyed variants too for all of them, none of them work for me.

    So odd. It seems it should work. No idea what I am doing wrong here.

    Or is this the joke? To get people to squint for minutes on end on their screen?

    • @[email protected]
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      212 days ago

      I was gonna tell you it was a meme and they don’t actually work. This being in science meme I thought they might actually be stereographic images, but it’s from so far away you wouldn’t be able to discern any 3D-ness. But I was wrong the height is exaggerated. For me the walleyed version worked for me, I just had to zoom in on one image and hold my phone quite far away.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      612 days ago

      I promise this isn’t a troll. In your case, it may be that your eyes are having difficulty focusing on nonexistent objects. If they’re blurry, it’s not that your eyes aren’t crossing, but rather that they are out-of-focus. Eyes naturally focus the lenses to bring near or distant objects into clarity, but when I was first doing magic eye images a long time ago, it also took me a while to convince my eyes that they needed to focus on the images.

      My guess is that, since the actual images are on the screen at distance A, but your eyes are crossing as if they’re looking at distance B, your eyes are auto-focusing for objects at B, but the images are still actually at A, so they appear out-of-focus.

    • @[email protected]
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      312 days ago

      I used to be able to do them at will, and even overlap images an additional time to get a crazy second level of shape.

      But now I can’t, thanks to the american health insurance industry. yay!

    • @[email protected]
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      312 days ago

      They do work. It takes some practice to get them though. At first I used a pencil or something to focus on while I made the two dots merge together, stayed focussed on the pencil until my brain “saw” the image behind it, then it sort of locked in and I could take the pencil away. I’ve done so many of them now that I can just go crosseyed to bring the dots together, then look at the middle picture.

      The 3D image works by tricking your brain into seeing a third image that isn’t really there. We’re used to constructing 3D images from two slightly different views; we do it all the time, so the two images are slightly different and when overlaid use the same mechanism to make you think it’s 3D.

  • @[email protected]
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    3613 days ago

    Why do all of these look inverted to me? Like, what should be a mountain is a deep hole in the ground.

      • @[email protected]
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        1313 days ago

        Wow, I had the same problem as the one you replied to and I thought you were making a joke I didn’t get but I stand corrected. You were absolutely 100% right.

        Turns out I was focusing at infinity, didn’t even realize it was a different thing than crossing my eyes until I tried to cross my eyes first before focusing on the pictures…

        Very cool, thanks.

        • @[email protected]OP
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          413 days ago

          You’re doing “wall eyed” viewing. These are for “cross-eyed” viewing. “Wall-eyed” means your eyes are focusing at a point behind the image. You need to cross your eyes for these. Try putting your finger in between your screen and your eyes, varying the distance until the dots merge. Then, remove your finger, focusing on the image itself. That should allow for cross-eyed viewing.

          • @[email protected]
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            110 days ago

            So weird. I can do this with my finger in the way but for some reason cannot hold my eyes in that position - as soon as I take the finger away my eyes unfocus. Maybe because it’s do uncomfortable to hold that eye pose?

      • @[email protected]
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        313 days ago

        Yup. That was exactly it. I was thinking “I know how to do these” and not even paying attention to the instructions at the bottom.

      • Lojcs
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        312 days ago

        Wow I had no idea it could be done that way. Just tried doing it and the image is way blurrier when ‘inverted’. I am near sighted. Does this mean it applies to illusions too?

  • @[email protected]
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    1313 days ago

    For some reason I’m getting the depth inverted. Mt. Saint Helens looks like a hole in the ground.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      1013 days ago

      You’re doing “wall eyed” viewing. These are for “cross-eyed” viewing. “Wall-eyed” means your eyes are focusing at a point behind the image. You need to cross your eyes for these. Try putting your finger in between your screen and your eyes, varying the distance until the dots merge. Then, remove your finger, focusing on the image itself. That should allow for cross-eyed viewing.

        • @[email protected]
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          313 days ago

          Same - I’m super confused now. I don’t know what I can do anymore. I thought I just crossed my eyes until the images overlap but when I do that I’m seeing a hole too…so I guess not?

          • jawa22
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            113 days ago

            No, there absolutely is some kind of error here via the creation.

            • erin
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              313 days ago

              I don’t think so. When I cross my eyes, it looks correct. Wall-eyed viewing makes it look like a hole. Crossing your eyes makes them go inward. Wall-eyed makes them go parallel. They’re created specifically for crossing eyes.

              • jawa22
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                13 days ago

                You are correct. I know that I am crossing my eyes.

                Edit: Well, I filmed it. Apparently only one eye is crossing, which has the same effect of seeing the left image from the right eye etc. I admit I was wrong, but I can usually see these correctly. That one in particular isn’t working in my brain for whatever reason.

                • @[email protected]
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                  112 days ago

                  Yeah I found the poster’s advice worked well. I.e. hold your finger between your eyes and the image and start focussing on your finger and them drop it away as the dots approach. It made me realize I wasn’t normally crossing my eyes (for say, magic eye images), I was looking past the image and kind of uncrossing my eyes.

                  With these ones, they definitely work by crossing your eyes.

          • erin
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            313 days ago

            That wouldn’t be crossing. Crossing is when you focus your eyes in front of the image. Wall-eyed is where you unfocus your eyes behind the image. Trying to look at your nose is crossing. The way you look at most magic eye images is wall-eyed.

      • @[email protected]
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        413 days ago

        Thanks that was it. I can lock in and focus the wall style very fast, as it is the most common. This took me while but got it with the finger trick!

  • @[email protected]
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    11 days ago

    How to make people on the internet staring at their phones like this:

    Worked well for me. Cool stuff!

  • Sibbo
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    513 days ago

    Cool effect. For me, it only works on a screen where the white dots are roughly the distance of my eyes. So not on a phone.