With the art almost touching your nose, just stare as if you were trying to look right through the page. Then move the page slowly away from your face. When the art is at a comfortable viewing distance, the image should come into focus. If it doesn’t, don’t worry. It may take several attempts before you see it.

On the first Sunday of 1994, cartoonist Greg Evans, creator of the comic strip Luann, captured in four short frames what millions of people had experienced with wonder, disbelief and frustration during the holiday season of 1993 – Holusion Art by NVision Grafix. This comic message marked a symbolic milestone for the young founders of NVision, Michael Bielinski and Paul Herber. Holusion Art, their creation, had become a part of American popular culture.

The concept for Holusion Art started in Dallas in 1991 as a collaboration between Bielinski and Herber. Herber, who had been associated with the B-2 Stealth Bomber project, approached Bielinski with some three - dimensional sketches he had done of the plane.

By coincidence, Bielinski had also been dabbling with 3-D images. After a brainstorming session in November and several months of late-night hacking, the first print of the Stealth Bomber rolled off the press in July of 1992. Herber sold several copies to friends in defense firms in California. When people began to glimpse the famous aircraft slicing through a sea of squiggles, it caused such excitement and disruption that the print was banned from the workplace. Holusion Art was born.

From its dual birthplaces of Dallas and Los Angeles, Holusion Art spread first across the United States, and then the globe. Two years after that first print appeared, Holusion Art is sold in more than fifty countries around the world, on all seven continents, including Antarctica.

Transcending the boundaries of language and nationality, Holusion Art has become a worldwide craze. But it is more than a fad. It is an art form of the future with lasting value for the collector and connoisseur.

There is only one requirement to see Holusion Art – good vision in both eyes. A simple test will determine if you should be able to see the art. Hold your thumb up a foot or two in front of your eyes and stare across the room at the wall. If you see two thumbs, you are capable of stereovision and should have no problem seeing the art. If you see only one thumb, then your stereovision is lacking or poor, and your eyesight may inhibit your ability.

People who are nearsighted or farsighted should be able to see the art, as long as their vision is corrected with glasses or contacts. However, severe astigmatism makes the art much harder to see. A common misconception is that color-blind people are unable to see Holusion Art. Not true. It’s the contrast of the pattern that hides the 3-D image, not the colors.

Several optometrists and eye doctors have agreed that viewing Holusion Art will not hurt your eyes in any way. In fact, some vision therapists use focusing exercises much like those used in seeing the 3-D images. A Wisconsin eye doctor was so excited about Holusion Art that he sent NVision a case of cheese!

The reason the majority of non-seers have trouble with Holusion Art is purely psychological, resulting from a type of mental block. Barring the eye problems previously mentioned, just about everybody should be able to see the art with proper coaching and a little relaxation. A good coach can achieve success rates of 95% and up.

Holusion Art, if you think about it, is a very democratic, equal-opportunity art form. The ability to see these hidden images is not related to your IQ, age maturity level or status in life. Young children can often see the images almost instantly, while their parents may struggle. So perhaps it helps to have a fresh mind open to new experiences.

In one way, Holusion Art is similar to the Rorschach test, those famous inkblots that supposedly reveal something about the viewer’s inner life. People who are highly competitive, analytical, or under stress often find it difficult to relax long enough to see the hidden image. As an experiment, you might try sending Holusion Art to someone who’s usually dealing with high stress – a high-level executive, for instance. The exec may take a couple of days to find the image.

Because your eyes are spaced about 21/2 inches apart, you see a slightly different perspective of the world with each eye. Scientists call this difference in perspective binocular disparity, and it plays an important role in depth perception. Binocular disparity is the fundamental principle behind Holusion Art. Try the Sausage Trick to demonstrate binocular disparity. Touch the tips of your index fingers together, hold your hands a foot in front of your face and stare at a wall across the room. If you have good stereovision, you should see the illusion of a small sausage pressed between your fingers.

Here’s another intriguing optical illusion. Take a loose piece of paper in your right hand, roll it into a tube, and look through it with your right eye. At the same time, place your left hand about six inches in front of your left eye, with the palm facing you, and the edge of your left hand resting against the tube. With both eyes open, stare across the room to see a hole in your hand.

These tricks work very much like Holusion Art. By looking past an object, you create an optical illusion because of binocular disparity.

Holusion Art has evolved from a process developed and patented in the 1970’s by a visionary artist named Donald Peck. Mr. Peck’s work was done by hand, which was a very tedious process. In effect, he was like the scribes of long ago who copied biblical texts. In the 1990’s, NVision obtained exclusive rights to Donald Peck’s patent. NVision automated and refined this process, bringing it to a new level through the use of the most advanced computers.

Designing images for inverted viewing is a new concept in Holusion Art--one of several new twists you can look for in the future. To view the image of the horse on Plate F, place your thumb between your eyes and the Holusion Art and focus on your thumb. Watch your thumb as you slowly move it closer and farther from your eyes, and at some point you should have the correct focus to see the inverted image.

To bridge the conceptual gap between Mr. Peck's work and Holusion Art, imagine a row of a thousand roses, rather than eight, fitting in the same space. The roses would each have to be extremely small and would look more like dots than roses. But, no matter how small, each could be shifted left or right to create varying levels of depth.

Next, imagine a thousand rows, rather than just one, each with its own thousand repeating dots. This would create one million tiny dots filling a page. Each dot could be manipulated individually to achieve its own level of depth. The dots would act just like cells or atoms, each one insignificant and barely visible by itself. But when combined with neighboring dots, they could form complex 3-D images, such as dinosaurs, trains or anything else conceivable.

A 3-D print contains up to sixteen million repeating microscopic dots that are individually shifted to create the illusion of depth. The dots vary in color so that your eyes distinguish between them. The colors are artistically chosen to form the unique patterns you see on the surface of the print. Think of it as computerized pointillism.

Individually placing and moving sixteen million tiny dots is no easy task, and certainly cannot be done by hand. The prints usually take weeks or months to create, using high-powered computers that are fast enough and accurate enough to place the millions of microscopic dots.

Not only is this art form changing the way we look at art, it's changing the way we look, period. Gazing at 3-D images brings delighted smiles and puzzled expressions to the faces of millions--as you've probably noticed at storefronts where crowds gather to stare in amazement at the latest prints.

At some shopping malls, crowds have had to be dispersed because the congestion in front of store windows was creating a hazard. In some cities, wild rumors have spread, with "reliable sources" claiming that the art was the work of CIA defectors and NASA scientists.

Illusions are just errors in perception of the illusion. They are differences in the appearance of a measurable aspect of the world such as size, distance, and shape. Sometimes there are hidden things in a picture. There may be another picture or a design inside the original picture. We get used to how things are supposed to be, and sometimes our brains get the clues all wrong.

Our brains put images together because they have learned to expect things, and sometimes the data might get a little confused. We may see an illusion because we know what we are supposed to see, even though part of a picture or design may not be completely there. The basis of this project is in how we perceive things. That almost explains everything right there. If our brain and eyes did not function like they do, we would not see illusions like we do.

One optical illusion is the television. The television is just showing you a continuous flow of still pictures, one right after the other. Your eyes along with your brain fill in all of the empty spots. Your brain has learned to expect movement. As a result, you brain can fill in all of the missing pieces and the television appears to be actually moving to you, even though it really isn’t!

A computer monitor is also one big optical illusion. Sometime when you have a chance, look at a computer screen really close for a minute or two. You will notice that you computer screen is made up of tiny red, green, and blue dots. The illusion is, you see more than just red, green, and blue dots; you see thousands of different colors. Our brains put the red, green, and blue dots together to make the colors.

Optical illusions just trick you into seeing something else. They are an error in our perception of the illusion. What you see is DEFINITELY not what you always get.

Try this interactive trick mule illusion
Trick Mule