“When you see it in 3-D, it puts you in an altered state.”

Most people don’t think of Magic Eye an exercise in considered graphic design, but that’s exactly what it is. Its gift shop roots make it easy to overlook its place in the long lineage of perceptual psychology tricks that have helped researchers make sense of the brain’s most confounding habits. “When you stare at something and it’s just pattern, and then suddenly you’re seeing something that’s not there, but it is there—that’s magical,” said Labbe, the mime who went on to work at Magic Eye as an artist in the mid-’90s and now owns a company called Studio 3D.

in their autostereograms like Julesz and Tyler, Salitsky’s enhancements to the software allowed Magic Eye designers to make images with something called “Salitsky Dots”—colorful, asymmetrical blobs whose position was calculated to render the hidden image slightly sharper than it would otherwise be.

Learning how to see the 3D in a 2D magic eye image is to learn the same process to see auras.