P3D Re: still waiting... part 1

[Larry Berlin <lberlin@xxxxxxxxx>]

>Date: Sat, 03 Jan 1998
>From: ron labbe <ron@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
>................

****  I'm not sure what you mean with your subject line, *still waiting*.
This is the first response from you I've seen since I posted the message you
are quoting from. Perhaps I scanned past it somehow... Reading time has been
at a premium...

>
>>From Larry Berlin:
>>I too have talked
>>with the folks at Magic Eye and a number of other publishers. If you got the
>>story only from Magic Eye, it's no wonder you may not have the full story... 
>>
>
>I didn't just "get the story from Magic Eye", I WAS a Magic Eye artist for
>two years. I am well aware of the competitors... We even hooked up with one
>of the best, Digi-Rule, for a number of works. 

****  Yes, Digirule was one of the best, and he didn't learn it from Magic
Eye... There were some negative shenanigans business-wise surrounding some
of their work with Digirule that I won't go into as I'm not sure just who
was responsible, the publisher or Magic Eye or ... though I suspect the
publisher had a lot to do with it...

>
>Now I'm still waiting for the list of amazing stereogram artists who were
>making far better stereograms "than magic eye ever dreamed of" [hello
>again?!] Please answer- you punch a lot of keys but little answer little: 
>>I too have talked
>>with the folks at Magic Eye and a number of other publishers.
>Larry, Magic Eye was not the publisher. So who did you speak with?

****  Technical note: *publisher* has several meanings. In one sense anyone
who created stereograms and had them published is in a sense a publisher
even though there may be a *book publisher* involved... When I said *other
publishers*, I mean OTHER publishers both as different artists, and
different book publishers, ie: no association with MEye.

****  I wrote to Magic Eye on several occasions for general stuff and had
phone conversations with some woman in their office. At one point I
attempted to contact them regarding stuff surrounding the patent/licensing
situation, and got no response. I tried their partner at Blue Moon (?) and I
think even had a phone conversation with someone there, but no real response
from significant persons. It's hard to communicate effectively by one way
and third party connections... They weren't very interested in talking with
anyone they didn't know at that time. Big business and all that...

>
> (that's TWO questions, please)
>

**** You want an actual list of other artists? I don't have a compiled list
handy, so I'd have to dig pretty deep into long ago stuff... Suffice it to
say that I followed the whole stereogram thing very closely. NONE of Magic
Eye's books came close to most of the competition until AFTER the patent had
been awarded and competition was dropping out. Then the Magic Eye books
started using some of the more advanced techniques others had used first. 

So pick any of the artists publishing stereograms early on, and they were
likely more advanced than Magic Eye in use of the medium at that point in
time, relative to published works. For one small list see the book, Another
Dimension from 21st Century Publishing. Several Japanese books that came out
later than Another Dimension went even farther. I don't know what MEye had
behind the scenes and weren't publishing.  There was a consistent pattern
throughout the entire externally visible process. Never once did an advanced
technique show up in MEye books first. Judging by published content, they
hardly deserved a patent for high resolution.  Judging by use of the medium,
other artists seemed to have a stronger grasp of what was going on in the
images and in the mind's eye of the beholder.

I supported Magic Eye with my purchases on a number of occasions and enjoyed
the content. However they never went beyond the simplest format of an
object, usually ultra common, such as a chair or spoon... floating in front
of a flat background... and in relatively low resolution stereograms.

The worst MEye stereogram product that I ever purchased, was the CD-ROM put
out under their label by MindScape. It was expensive ($45) but a
cheap-ripoff value wise. It contained stereograms as simple as the first
ones ever produced, and software to make stereograms, but ONLY the same
elementary simplistic ones already present in the gallery section. It
wouldn't even let the user import their own patterns!!! Much better software
already existed and was available in many places, including from Magic Eye
themselves, that allowed the user to create or use their own shapes as well
as patterns. Hidden away in the farthest recesses of the CD were a couple
animated stereograms that were very poorly presented, and they were NOT
impressive animations. One was animated ripples supposed to coincide with
the surface of a pond, yet it wasn't the same size as the pond graphic,
wasn't the same color and wasn't even centered on the pond. The ONLY aspect
of the CD product that was creative was the graphics used for navigation and
that wasn't any form of stereo. While it was impressive, it wasn't what I
would have paid $45 for...  It was a product that might have been
appropriate at the beginning of stereograms, but being released at the tail
end of the cycle, it was really really out of date... It's no wonder it
didn't sell very well. (I know Magic Eye didn't actually create this
product, they licensed some german guys to make it)

Significantly after the patent, they finally published some books that
included the more advanced imaging techniques others had already used, and
which I had envisioned about two years earlier, before anyone used them. But
that was far too late to save or resurrect public interest. If they knew of
such techniques earlier and just delayed using them, they were very foolish.
I can't imagine them having a better technique and not using it in the face
of competition, therefore I believe they didn't understand the medium, they
seemed to only understand their algorithm as they had developed it and they
seemed stuck to the algorithm.

end part one....

Larry Berlin

Email: lberlin@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.sonic.net/~lberlin/
http://3dzine.simplenet.com/


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