An up-close look at the 1990s fad, 3-D images, and how one entrepreneur stumbled into it and hit pay dirt.
Fad products are here today, gone tomorrow -- and nobody knows it better than Tom Baccei. Still, ever optimistic, he's focusing his magic eye on the future
Tom Baccei, who has worked for 72 days straight, holds up what passes for his Rolodex these days: a thick stack of new and old phone messages that hints of done deals, deals in the making, and media interviews that would do a press agent proud -- if he had one.
The calendar says June 29, 1994; the 50-year-old Baccei (pronounced buh-SHAY) and his 3-D Magic Eye illusions are as hot as the weather. He's got two Magic Eye books on the best-seller lists simultaneously -- and two more (including a Christmas book titled Do You See What I See? ) in production at his nine-employee company, N.E. Thing Enterprises, in Bedford, Mass. More than 200 newspapers are running his weekly syndicated feature in their color-comics sections. He recently signed a deal with General Mills that will have cereal eaters looking for his hidden 3-D images on the backs of some 20 million boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios and Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. T-shirts. Posters. Coffee mugs. Ties. Baccei's problem is which licensing deals to turn down.
Not since his stint as a cross-country bus driver for the legendary hippie bus line the Green Tortoise has Baccei had such a wild and wonderful and unpredictable ride. His vehicle these days: capitalism's come-and-go comet, the flashy phenomenon otherwise known as the fad product. Sightings are rare: at best a couple a decade. And frankly, what constitutes a fad is somewhat debatable. (See "Fads: The Ultimate Capitalist Tool?" on page 4.) But one thing is certain. When a fad sweeps the country, big money funnels back to the creator or controller of the fad.
"What do you do with a check for $1 million?" Baccei wonders aloud. Any day now, he's expecting a windfall in that ballpark from his publisher, Andrews and McMeel. "It's as if you're a hunter and you've just bagged a big deer. Now how do you get all the meat into the freezer?"
Clearly, there's still a pinch-me-I-must-be-dreaming quality to the blur that has been Baccei's life for the past year or so, when a $100-million industry snapped into focus. But Baccei's success is like his pictures, which at first glance appear to be so many indecipherable random swatches of color and then, when viewed properly, reveal hidden three-dimensional images. Upon examination, Baccei's quixotic success also displays an underlying "deep sight." He has held a vision from the start of how to manage, market, and leverage this fad, so that when it runs its course, just maybe he'll be left holding more than a bag of money.
Tom Baccei did not invent the latest marvel of 3-D viewing, but in hindsight, he appears blessed with many of the right skills and instincts to capitalize on its fadlike charms. Since the 1838 invention of the stereoscope by English physicist Sir Charles Wheatstone, 3-D viewing has displayed a roller-coaster-like pattern of peaks of popularity alternating with valleys of indifference. At the 1939 World's Fair, viewers watched Chrysler Motor Co.'s 15-minute 3-D film through glasses whose polarizing lenses resembled the headlights of popular Chrysler models. Thirteen years later, stereoscopic viewing took off again when Life magazine ran a shot of General Eisenhower touring Europe with a Realist 3-D camera in hand. The 1950s also brought a slew of Hollywood B-movies, one-trick ponies like Bwana Devil. ("A Lion in Your Lap! A Lover in Your Arms!" proclaimed the posters.) In the 1960s and 1970s, filmmakers again passed out flimsy colored glasses to moviegoers, but this time the fare was X-rated; often, the reviews were better than the movies. Wrote one reviewer of The Starlets: "The action is so real, I thought I was cheating on my wife."
Though tantalizing, 3-D viewing was limited by the enabling mechanical devices -- the handheld View-Masters and the goofy glasses -- until the late '50s, when Bell Labs electronics engineer Bela Julesz used a computer to generate what he called "ambiguous stereograms." He achieved the effect of a stereoscope, which presents the eye with two slightly different representations of the same two-dimensional image; the brain, in trying to reconcile those minute differences, is tricked into perceiving depth. Starting with two identical squares of randomly generated black-and-white dots, Julesz used the computer to shift a pattern of dots in the right image slightly to the left, filling the resulting empty space with more random dots. The brain, fusing the two images into one, detects the pattern and, interpreting the shift as depth, sees that pattern floating above a speckled background. In a scientific paper published in 1968, Julesz foreshadowed the appeal of this "naked-eye" approach to 3-D viewing: "In the case of holograms, the observer has to inspect them from various positions, while for ambiguous stereograms it is the mind of the observer that wanders around."
Tom Baccei's mind certainly wandered when he saw his first random-dot image in the spring of 1990. Random-dot stereograms, which until that time had been discussed mostly in academic circles, inched closer toward the masses in a single-frame adaptation of the technique published in Stereo World, a publication for 3-D enthusiasts that had recently added Baccei to its subscriber rolls. Baccei, then president of a small high-tech company called Pentica Systems Inc., did more than marvel: he immediately perceived a novel way to market his company's in-circuit emulators, debugging tools for systems engineers. Writing his own computer program to generate a random-dot image, Baccei "hid" the model number of one of his products in the field of dots. Then he ran an ad with the headline "Pentica Loves Puzzles" in a trade journal, promising an unspecified prize to readers who could identify the hidden image.
