I see them inverted. I’m left handed, I figure that has something to do with it

Yes.

The instructions say don’t cross your eyes but that’s horseshit and probably why so many people fail to see them.

My method is to cross my eyes, then uncross them slowly until the 3d effect appears, then hold on that position.

Yes, you have to imagine you are looking into a mirror at yourself and focus your eyes on that place; look past the image.

Yep. There was one on the Sunday comics page every week when I was a kid, and I learned how to do it then. I never understood the people who can’t do it, or thought it was fake.

Someone made a modified version of Quake back in the day, that rendered to stereoscopic 3D in a white noise pattern.

It was such a mindfuck to play!

You get 3D depth but no colors or shades or contrast. It’s just shapes moving. So doors that were flush with the wall were impossible to see, but enemies in dark rooms were fully visible because there is no light or dark.

I like to imagine I got to experience what a bat sees with echolocation.

Not usually, no.

I finally realized how to reliably do it in my early 20s (a while ago now) but still can to this day. Just have to start with it at my face haha.

Yes. I can change my vision’s focal point and focus distance at will, so it’s usually easy even though my eyesight is getting fucky with age.

My parents were of the opinion they were an elaborate hoax until they had me draw what I saw in one of them.

This was in a newspaper 30 or so years ago maybe. The image was accompanied by a depth-map image of what should be visible, but they covered that up. Then they asked if I’d looked at the newspaper before them because, even with my terrible art skills, it was clearly what was in the depth-map version.

I think they believed me in the end though.

Yes.

Yeah, but I have to stick my face right up close and slowly move it away to do so.

Phone/tablet screens work best for it.

Im in my 30s and learned a few years ago, my brother in law showed me how. Was super cool, I had always thought it was people trolling

I can view the convergent (cross-eyed) ones no problem. I managed once to focus on the divergent ones with like 30 minutes of practice, but I had trouble focusing normally afterwards for like an hour so I haven’t tried since.

It’s harder than it was before I needed bifocals, but yeah.

Once you learn the trick of it, it gets easier to do.

I wanna say I was late teens/early twenties when they first started showing up in my area, and I stood in the store I first saw one for like a half hour trying to see the image. My vision was kinda bad across the board, even then. But I got the first one, which was a boat, and then flipped through the rest of the selection they had, maybe five or six different ones?

But any time I got new glasses, it would take a few minutes to adjust when I’d run across one again. Same if I needed new ones.

They really are fun

I can, but it is sometimes tricky. Usually I can make the image go into 3D mode without too much trouble, but I sometimes can’t figure out what I’m supposed to be seeing. Like, I can tell that things are at different depths but I have a hard time resolving it into a complete cohesive image. I think it is mostly due to the weird random pattern that makes up the image and the difficulty in finding how the edges work together. It could just be shitty stereograms, though, since most of them work fine.