Spot the Differences TRICK

So you know when you are with some friends at a bar and you end up drunkenly playing the "Spot the Difference" game on that touch screen machine near that loud girl at the pool table yelling at her boyfriend that she is ready to leave... well here is the trick to this game so you can impress all your friends.

It's kind of like those Magic Eye things that were cool in the 90's. (I had a Disney book full of them).

Image from Vision3d.com

In order to do these, you are supposed to like look past the image, as if you are looking to the other side of your computer. That was how I learned as a kid even though my mom claimed holding it close to your face then slowly moving the image further away worked better.

I bet a few of you just tried to do the "everyone in the library is probably wondering why I am holding my laptop at arms length and squinting" drill just now. Other hints are to "just squint" or "cross your eyes" but these don't work for me. After enough practice, you sort of just... get it. Or you never will and will hate everyone else who is like "you can't see the dinosaur?! It's RIGHT there!".

Anyway, moving on to the real goal of this post, how to impress your friends and ruin the fun out of any future spot the difference Sunday cartoon game.

Only catch, the two images MUST be side by side. If they are on top of each other, you will have to turn your head, the computer, or rotate the images sidewise using a "rotate" function on many image viewers.

Some say the Magic Eye technique works for this, but I had a hard time doing it the first time (now I can... weird how our brains work). But this is the approach that worked for me (and it still took me about an hour of feeling like I was trying to make my Mac levitate by staring so hard). This image only has one difference.

Try to use your left eye to look at the image on the right, and vise versa. Try to get the two images to overlap one another. This may take some patience. You should begin to see one image in the middle of the two. Let your eyes focus on the middle image until it sort of jumps out at you (like a 3D movie kind of deal). The place were the difference is located will being to blink, or illuminate, or look blurry. This is because your brain is receiving two different inputs and can't chose between the two.

I found that if the image is smaller, it seemed to work best. So push command - or ctrl - or the old fashion "view zoom out" and see if that helps.

Can you find it the difference? Yes?! Awesome, go impress someone and don't tell them the secret.

Can't find it? Too bad, I'm not going to tell you what it is, you'll just have to have a ROCKy time figuring it out.

Try out these three images posted on a discussion board at MyFitnessPal (not sure how it's related to fitness).

Song of the day: Zebra - John Butler Trio