I have found something interesting today. As you see, the continuous animation on your left, pictures three grayish rods traveling up and down – indefinitely. Optical illusion produced here, makes my brain think the rods are also traveling to the right, altogether moving in a zigzagged direction. Am I the only one experiencing this? Do I have your support, or have I gone completely mad? Please tell me. Those black and white tiles located inside our little rods, surely appear often! It can’t be they are there by mistake. It’s funny how often we meet them. They were also present in our last illusion (funny building), if I’m not mistaken. Hope someone creates similar animations using this technique – there could be few more interesting results, don’t you think? Credit for this animation goes to Scott Henderson from Cool Illusions.
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very nice!
sure,
rods seem to go to the right :P
This is my first comment here. These ‘black and white square’ (or other shaped) illusions are quite grouse (cool). It has been known for some time that these combinations of black and white affect how they are perceived by the brain.
You may or may not already know that this principle was used by navies in WWI and WWII, painted various warships this way as it was confusing to submariners viewing such a ship through a periscope – the viewer had difficulties determining the direction of travel and distance of the intended target. Rushing the shot probably meant a miss while taking the time to work out the illusion meant that the periscope was visible longer than needed and increased the chance of detection, something that is a main principle of submarine warfare (at least until a torpedo is fired).
It also affected viewing from a surface vessel as well!
Thank-you for these, please keep em coming!
its happening to me to! that’s cool!
It does look like that so you’re not the only one to see ^_^
Yea its actually prrety simple and easy to see. keep up the good work
Yes, you have gone completely mad! Just kidding. They seem to drifting to the right to me as well. First time commenting for me, longtime fan of your site.
I thought: what’s special about that… they’re just spinning around, going from one side to the other….
Took a few seconds to realize I was wrong :)
Totally agree. IT appears as if it were a checkered cylinder rolling to the left.
PS: Love the site!
Yah… they do look like moving to the right! Cool!
same to me.. the brain has to deal with 2 movements at the same time, trying to combine them into a non existing one !..
The illusion is even more obvious if you dont look the image directly, but look at the text beside.
ahh this one makes me feel nauseous
What do you mean about the black and white tiles?
Oh, i love this one!
Took me a while to catch on. :)
Great illusion, works better if you look indirectly.
hmmm… guess I’m the odd ball out. All I saw was three rods moving up and down with black and white checkboard pattern spinning on the rods. I was wondering what was so special about them.
But if I look at them out of the corner of my eye I see what you see, so now I understand.
I always have been the oddball out though… in everything, so it doesn’t surprise me to much.
Maybe it didn’t work at first because I used to stare at illusions alot when I was little….?
it appears that they are moving to the right, but that i the illusion! really they are just moving up and down. good illusion though! keep it up :)
When i first looked at this I was wondering why they never hit the right side of the square….then i realised….d’oh!
Hi
First time comment for me to
Your site is always a good morning start with interesting mind bubbles!
I guess this one also works whith fooling your brain
cilinders that rotate on a suface usually are roling… so moving…
You can help your brain get the real picture by focusing on the left cilinder, that one is close enough to the edge to see there’re not moving right, only up and down
So I see a small jump after the figures went up and back down. Probably my mind triwes to connect the place I should see them and the place they really are…
not my fave but pretty good!
The weird thing is I KNOW they’re only going up and down but I still see them as drifting towards the right!
It seem like there moving in a zig-zag like you described but if you focus carefully you see the rods are just moving up and down
I found it worked more when I wasn’t looking directly at it. If I kept my eyes on your blog next to the illusion – they definately appeared to be bouncing over to the right and then back again.
If looked at directly, doesn’t do much. Look to the side so periphery vision take control and they move a lot more
WOW!
While I was reading the paragraph, it seems to move right and when I looked at the animation, it started to move right again, and I was thinking, when will they get all the way to the right? Then, I realized the illusion.
Yes, I also see the effect, it’s the strongest when you don’t focus on it.
…amazing… I thought that it was just rods going from left to right also. Now I see that it is actually just panes of color grouped up and moving simotaneously before going back to the starting point.
Nice Illusion
Bonnise
Yup! Its defo a good one. More like this would be cool!
this is a really good one. they’re not going to right at all are they? anyway, this is a pretty original one. sometimes u just have illusions that are exactly like ur previous ones. u r still doing great! long time fan as well.
I love this!
Please keep up the good work, I love seeing all the interesting illusions you find and/or are sent, it’s really a nice little mental break from my work day.
Thanks!
Sometimes I think these illusion are stronger than LSD…
It is just ultra real.
man, a trip is 16 hours, this is 60 seconds and you get a brain damage, too!
Wow, great site with great Grafix
Fix me now
Really cool! :D And I totally see the zig zag thing too, don’t worry. Keep up the awesomeness!
I can see it too… cool!
I can also see the weird zig-zag effect. It’s amazing that they are just moving up and down! This is soooo cool!
I got fooled when I first saw, and I managed to fool my little brother, nice.
What it is is the fact that the checkers are changing so that gives it the ILLUSION that it is moving to the right
Coooooooooooollll!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Whoah! I got them to reach the other side of the image. Cool.
Maybe were all going mad!
Please place some patterns on the surround, varying size, orientation, even more moving them with differing directions and speed. This will make a decent study with which you can publish in a major international, peer reviewed journal, before then, you may want to do some literature review whether this is a new illusion or not.
This effect can be understood in terms of local-global motion paradigm and foveal vs. peripheral motion. In the latter paradigm, I can tell one thing: localization of feature extracted in the periphery is less accurate than it is on fovea.
I think, that our ancestors had a big evolutionary advantage, if their peripheral vision was very sensitive to moving objects, so that they could notice predators earlier than others. The price we have to pay for it (beeing fooled by an optical illusion that is simulating motion) seems not too high, regarding that if they hadn’t developed this sensitivity, we would not be here…
In general, a moving stimulus on stationary background causes urgency for the visual system to repond quickly even if it is presented on fovea, because it introduces a high level of contrast which readily calls immediate attention for further processing. High contrast in brightness, color or other features means it has a high level of energy, variations or uncertainty in the region of stimulus. It could be a predator or a prey. Perhaps, peripheral vision may have been equipped to detect this high spatial or temporal contrast stimulus rather than to provide details. In fact, receptors on the periphery are far larger than those on fovea, not well suited to extracting accurate location information.
I see it when I dont look directly at the image (like when I read the text right to the image)
i guess u r mad. i only c 2 lines going up and down. u r very mad.
Bzzz… I suppose if you move those rollers, and change the direction of the rolling, it’ll be the exact opposite. Illusion, man! Illusion!!!
You aren’t going mad. It DOES look that way!
the rods seem to move to the rite because they are spinning to the rite
yea if you look away from it they look like they are moving to the right