Floating Maze Optical Illusion

Tom Davison sent in what truly appears to be a great find! Seemingly animated illusions are interesting for what they stand for, but when you take their floating sample and fuse it with something purposeful, then you’re on right tracks to get noticed. For example, take the billboard posters we saw recently. What we have here today is an interesting maze puzzle, spiced with an additional optical illusion obstacle. You can open the picture in full-size to get the stronger effect. Do you notice anything strange when you try to find your way from point S to point E?

Floating Maze Optical Illusion
Try and find your way from “Start” to “End”. Have you noticed any additional obstacles?

78 Replies to “Floating Maze Optical Illusion”

  1. Perfect……….this is the best of its kind………………………………………………..it is moving like crazy xD xD

  2. It seems to flip-flop between which color is the floor and which is the walls.
    solving the maze itself was pretty simple

  3. The maze itself was pretty easy to navigate. I love that this maze seemed to be moving all over the place!

  4. Aha, that is really awesome, first run through i didnt notice it but i ran into a wall… took me 3 “deaths” until i completed it, but really cool illusion =D

  5. that is trippy and cool.

    i havent tried it yet but I think that it is impossible to get from s to e

  6. I really enjoy this illusion, but I have some suggestions for the site in general.

    Most of the time, I view the site on my blackberry, is there any way to have some sort of mobile site to access instead of just the way the phone just views webpages.

    Also, with the twitter updates, is it possible to upload the actual illusion with the tweet? There are hosting services such as yfrog that allow you to include pictures in the actual tweet and I would be able to view the picture in the app that I use to view twitter.

    Just a few suggestions. I love the site otherwise.

    -Jason

  7. I see a simple maze that is easily traveled from start to finish. That’s all. What am I missing? Can it be that if you take a wrong turn anywhere, you end up exiting the maze without reaching the end?

  8. hey. long time fan @ moilusions. been following it since it first started. just got an email last week. this is cool, although i could follow this from start to finish

  9. Is it a maze that is easy to follow? I am missing something and I am not sure what it is. It’s really frustrating knowing there is something else to this illusion, but not knowing what it is. This is a real brain teaser, yes indeed.

  10. Once you view the maze with a large screen the motion comes into full effect. Very nice I must say.

    Once you reduce the size you can still see the motion.

    Works very well with large screens

  11. I made an interesting observation. I zipped right through the puzzle without noticing any effect at all. Then I read the comments to see what the big deal was. After reading the comments I tried the puzzle again and the illusion of the shifting boundaries to be quite pronounced. Even though I solved the puzzle the first time without any effect, after finding out there was an illusion it took me two tries to solve it again. On the first try I looked at the whole picture and immediately saw the correct path. The second time I couldn’t see the path because the illusion appeared in the periphery as I tried to follow through the maze. After looking away for a moment I was able to refocus on the puzzle as a whole again. My initial ignorance was beneficial in this case.

  12. there are a couple posts by people who apparently don’t see the effect … I didn’t see it either until I went to full-size … try that if you’re having a problem seeing the “floor” turn into the top of a “wall”

  13. Well… It is quite easy to get the obstacle IF you go backwards to forwards. I do not know why, but it took me a long time to get even remotely close if I started at S (start). Then, when I started at E and tried to go beck to S, I immeditely got there. Hmm…

  14. I can’t see any visual illusion. I can easily solve it (without leaving the confines of the maze, although the maze is odd in that there isn’t a perimeter wall). What am I supposed to see? Is it like those Magic pictures (that I also could never see anything in them)?

  15. this is freakin my mind
    its awesome first time i thought it is animated but after a wink i found its all still, its amazing
    but getting from S to E is quite easy :-)

  16. Strange – the effect seems much stronger on the computer screen than on a print out, and a color print out is better than a grey scale print out – must have something to do with the colors as well as the interlocking shapes

  17. This is very cool.

    I am very curious about how this is done, so I had a bit of a tinker with the graphics and found out this:

    1. It works best with those colours, instead of, say, grey and white. I guess they kind of clash.

    2. What REALLY makes it work well is the shading around each wall. Normally you’d expect it to be black on bottom and left and white on top and right (ie. light source top right). But this is different in different parts of the maze.

    I think the optical illusion has to do with the way our brains interpret something with dark bottom/left and light top/right edges to be 3D. When this is not constant, but swaps around all over the picture, our brains can’t get a “handle” on it and it moves all about.

  18. How the heck does this work? And why doesn’t it work if I print it in black and white? Don’t know if it works in colour.

    1. it’s because of the difference between shapes white and black, they aren’t from the same direction.

  19. Crossed it in less than 15 secs. The side of the walls seems to be a darker blue here & there, & some of the walls seem to float up & sink back down after I’ve passed them.

  20. For those who say they can’t see anything, some of us see a gel like maze which appears to be slowly undulating. When I look at the maze, I see several similar patterns. Because the similar patterns are not in alignment, for many of us, our minds try to make something meaningful out of what we see. The automatic response, perhaps, is to try and bend these similar patterns into alignment. A couple of other things I noticed, in addition to the undulation, is that my mind flips between seeing the shape forms predominately as part of the green shade then the blue; when the green is dominate, it appears at a higher elevation than the blue, or the other way around for blue.

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