Insight

I've reposted Magritte's The False Mirror here, because it deserves to head a topic - you can read more about it in the previous Gate(way) of Peacocks post.

When the game was put out in 1990, the N. E. Thing graphic craze was 3 years away - I had no cultural clue about what the puzzle was about. The first Magic Eye book in Japan came out in late 1991, but back then crazes did not transfer fast, the books in the USA did not start until 1993. 

The technical description of the graphic is an auto-stereogram. Where the regular stereogram requires special equipment io realize stereo images (the 'View-Master', with its round slides is a familiar example), the auto-stereogram only requires someone with the aptitude or training to resolve the image.

Stork and Rocca 1989

The seminal technical paper (above) gives the details on how stereo information is encoded between the parallax differences of the left and right eye's interpretation of visual information. At the end of the paper, the authors offer the reader a copy of the Apple application they developed to produce autostereograms, just by sending a self addressed, stamped envelope with a floppy enclosed. This seems so primitive when you compare it to the "arxiv" that researchers use online today, where a (very lightly) reviewed paper from nearly anyone is posted as a PDF, for anyone else on earth to download for free, instantly.

Wonder what the samizdat circumstances were for Roger to get this paper so early? Did he know researchers from Stork's department, graduated and disbursed across academia? The subject is well within Roger's specialty, so it does make sense he would be plugged in the network, such as it was back then.

The clue embedded in the autostereogram is "seeing the light" - the three words stacked one atop another. The letters appear to be three dimensional, and float above a background. My expert said to see this you need to "sort of cross your eyes, and then uncross and cross them until the image catches your attention." Good luck with that!

Returning to our Four Lock Gate investigations, a new active area was added when we selected the druid's tree - the "Seeing the Light" text area. When we select that area, nothing changes - no buttons are added, and when you look around, it's not obvious that there are any other symbols to add! We are on  notice that the game difficulty is going up yet another notch ...