Hi All,
I purchased "Magic Eye Beyond 3D" which Pete recently recommended. This is a fantastic recommendation and its given me literally hours of fun.
The link with photo reading is that in order to view the images you have to enter the photo focus state - in other words diverge your eyes and focus at infinity. When you do this the magical 3 dimensional images spring to life, and by definition, if you are observing the images then you are in the photo focus state.
I decided to try a little experiment with the images in order to establish if the photo focus stage of photo reading is as important as it is claimed to be. My tests seem to show that it is indeed significant.
I used my wife as a subject as she has no experience whatsoever of photo reading, but can see the 3 D images in the "Magic Eye Beyond 3D". I cut an article out of a newspaper; this was a single column about the length of a 3D picture in the book.
I let my wife preview the column of a few hundred words. I told her to look for key words and gave her just 5 seconds to do so.
I then snatched the article back and got her to view her favourite image in the Magic Eye book, when she could comfortably see the 3 D image I then placed the newspaper column onto the image but instructed her to continue to view the image and not to consciously read the column of print. I let her view it for 10 seconds so that there could be no dispute that she had photo focused on the newspaper column.
After 10 seconds I told her to close the book, gave her a few minutes to let the info sink in then got her to activate. I did this by asking her what she thought the article was about. To her amazement she got the answer correct and was able to tell me the gist of the article.
We then performed a rapid read stage. I gave her the article and told her to read it as fast as possible. She did this in 20 seconds. Following this stage she immediately had full comprehension.
This means that she only had site of the article for 35 seconds and had total recall.
Remember, this is from someone who had never tried photo reading before.
We then got a similar sized article that she read normally. This took 90 seconds and she felt that the information wasn't as clear as the previous photo read article.
I think its very interesting to play with the 3D images in the book and view them with text put in front of them. It provides a valuable lesson in learning photo reading, in particular reaching the photo focus state.
Mark.
