This Amazing Magic Eye Music Video Hides Fun Secret Moving Images

This Amazing Magic Eye Music Video Hides Fun Secret Moving Images

Remember how frustrating those Magic Eye images were when you were a kid? It seemed like everyone but you could see the hidden message. Until you figured it out and rubbed it in everyone’s face that they couldn’t see it. This video by Young Rival is just like those Magic Eye pictures only it turns the whole hidden message thing into one entire music video. It’s so much fun.

I was struggling to decipher the video but eventually relaxed my eyes, went full screen with it and dropped 10 80 peas on this thing and had it magically pop up. It starts with words and then leads to the band members and eventually bumps and pulsates and ends with craziness (I swore I saw a dolphin). The trick in doing this is using a stereogram, an image that can produce the illusion of depth. The video says that, subtle changes in a repeating pattern can “combine depth information for both eyes into one single image”. You just gotta play a little game with your eyes to see it.

The video, which was directed by Jared Raab and programmed by Tomasz Dysinki, was done with an Xbox Kinect and a computer. They explain:

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.

They then ran the data through an algorithm and it took each frame, converted it into a stereogram image and put it in the video. It’s a complicated process that turned out pretty awesome. My eyes might be rolled backwards in my head but I never had so much fun screwing with my vision.