When an Optical Illusion Briefly Took Over the World

For a flash in the 1990s, Magic Eye, the world’s most famous flash and infamously frustrating—optical illusion, was everywhere. Posters bearing the brightly colored op-art hung from the walls of Midwestern mall kiosks. Postcards filled gift store racks. Books with taglines like “A new way of looking at the world,” lined and then disappeared from store shelves as people snatched up more than 20 million copies of the series.

Magic Eye was something of a paradox: a deliberate graphic mess that relied on grids and precision to achieve its intended effect. The fact that it was so difficult to see the 3-D shape hiding behind the hypercolored patterns was a major part of its appeal. To find the secret image, people adopted a signature Magic Eye stance: bent forward, handson-hips, staring—dumbfounded—at the visual static in front of them. The others who crowded around (there were always others) passed along tips like an unsuccessful game of telephone—Cross your eyes. No, squint. Try relaxing.

Click. Suddenly the image would appear. Every illusion is solvable, as long as you know how to look at it.

For a time, people were obsessed with the visual trickery of not being able to see what was directly in front of them. And then, just as quickly, they weren’t. “Fads have a predictable life,” says Tom Baccei, who would know better than anyone.

As one of the creators of Magic Eye, Baccei and his small team of designers orchestrated one of pop culture’s most bewildering whims, turning an obscure perceptual experiment into a publishing empire. To be honest, he finds the whole thing just as curious as you do. “It was the right place at the right time,” he said recently, speaking from his home in Vermont.

But in the more than 25 years since Magic Eye first hit bookstore shelves, the 74-year-old, self-styled retired hippie has come to learn a lot about what happens when you follow the unexpected bends in the road when they come your way. “Life is a real pinball machine,” he continued. “The most successful people understand that and they don’t try to force the game. They follow the bounces and try to keep ahead of them as much as they can.”

The story of Magic Eye begins at a technology company in a quiet office park outside of Boston. At the start of the ’90s, Baccei was working as the U.S. manager of Pentica Systems, a British company that sold in-circuit emulators, small devices that were used to debug early computers. At the time, Pentica was looking to boost sales in the United States for a product called the MIME in-circuit emulator, and it was up to Baccei to create an advertisement to run in a national trade magazine.

Baccei came up with a concept in which a mime would stand at the end of a conference table, his arm digitally altered to appear as if it were plugged into a series of wires that connected to a computer. “It was a play on the phrase ‘chairman of the board,’” he recalled, chuckling at his old idea. Baccei wrote the copy and hired a photographer and a pantomimist who...