Ah, the Cuisine, ah, the om-be-ance… but wait a minute… there’s a Paris in Kentucky USA as well. The difference is quite startling however..

Oh la la…

Oh la nah…

Well, it had to happen, after optical illusions and all. The commonly found dotty pictures are properly called SIRDS (Single Image Random Dot Stereogram). They work on interference patterns that fool your eyes into seeing a picture focused either in front of or behind the paper (or screen) they are displayed on.

Human vision works like this… When we focus on an object, Each eye sees a very slightly differing picture of it. The brain then combines these pictures to build 3 dimensional information we can understand…

When something we are interested in is behind a thin mesh fence, we tend not to notice the fence. This is becuase the fence produces an interference pattern that our brain throws out… unless we look at the fence directly. In the same way, we can produce a 2 dimensional picture (the fence) and adjust the pixels so that if we focus past the fence, we can see what we are interested in. This is easy to do in real life, because the visual cues tell us that there really is something behind the fence. We are all perfectly aware that the monitor you are now looking at has a flattish screen and that nothing is hidden in back of it.

The way to see these images is to look past the screen into the distance, once you get to the right spot in space, the picture jumps out… once you can see the image, you can look around the scene because you now have the faked visual cues to tell your brain that the image is really there.

There is another way of looking at some of the SIRDS, that is cross viewing… it involves crossing your eyes so you are actually focussing on something closer to you than the screen… this can be painful though.

Training your eyes to see things is not that difficult. Usually you get 2 dots at the top of the pictures kinda like training wheels on a bike. I never got them to work, so heres one that I can do. Check out these two eyes.

Look at them so they are level with your eyes, and relax… when relaxing, the natural eye movement is to focus further away. If you have a thin monitor, try to focus at the wall behind it… ideally, most pictures are focused at about a foot behind the screen. Once you get it, you should see 3 eyes, the one in the middle is standing out in 3D.

as you start to look at the image, you’ll see 4 dots… this is because each eye sees both dots… as you get close, the right dot from the left eye and the left dot from the right eye merge to produce the 3D image, and the image hidden in the picture is revealed…

There is software about that will create these images for you, either based on a gif that you ‘map’ but these are difficult and take your attention back to the image you can see. The software can also use random colour dots… This method is best. The software also needs a ‘depth map’. This is a grayscale picture where white represents up close and personal, and black is way back there.

The pixels of the image or random noise you provide as a ‘front image’ are fiddled with, basically dragged the right distance depending on how close they are supposed to be. What you end up with is a dotty picture with a hidden image.

Here are three versions of the picture with different dot sizes so you can use the one that is easiest for you.

All this is cool, but then we have graphics adapters as well… bet you’d never hav thought you could use text as well??? In the same way you specify a depth map in gray scale, you can get software that takes a digital value representing height. For example…

Is turned into this, a little more tricky, but worth it (click on it to view it properly).

This is one of the oddest, click on it to make it a bit bigger.

This illusion of the changing colours of the spots is caused by the blind spot in the back of your eye, and how your brain compensates with whats called the ‘fill-in’ effect. The spots change colour because your brain is attempting to ‘fill-in’ the white spots using the surrounding detail, namely all the black.

Your retina covers the back of your eye, except for a single spot. This is where all the nerve bundles meet and leave your eye via the optic nerve. Whats happening here is that your brain is making a guess at what goes in this spot by incorrectly estimating the surroundings.

To find your blind spot, close your left eye. Look at the plus sign on the left of the images below with your right eye (click on them to make them bigger). Move closer/away from the screen until the spot/cross on the right disappears.

Contact with Beagle 2 on December 25, 2003. A few days later, the NASA project landed safely, and started showing us up.

I have toiled long and hard, and with my contacts in NASA and the British MoD, I have uncovered the real reasons.

In a dramatic race to the red planet, NASA and ESA, suffering from the cibling rivalry had some issues. During a scene in the soon to be aired episode of “Worlds Wildest Police Videos” on the Bravo sky channel, The beagle 2 orbiter was seen to be throwing ‘evidence’ from the vehicle. The Chasing “Police Vehicle” then performed a PIT manoeuvre, and disabled the European crafts transmitting devices.

In a statement not issued by the Beagle team, “We were expecting this kind of action from our buddies accross the pond, and planned a backup procedure accordingly." a spokesman didn’t say. “We have since contacted the lander and have received this photo, clearly showing why The U.S. didn’t want us to land there."

And here is the photo.