I learned to see those many years before they were popular. There were some similar images, though in black and white, in Scientific American back in the 70s. Regular stereo photo image pairs were called stereograms. Scientific American had pairs of images that looked like random dots, but if you crossed your eyes and allowed them to focus away from the plane of the paper, you could see an image. They were called "stare-e-o-grams" because you had to stare at them. The Magic Eye images are a variation of that technique where the two images are put together into one, with an overall colorful image hiding the interferences. I'm not sure if you can understand it without seeing the examples I saw years ago.