Weirdest optical illusion I've ever seen.

Skeptic Ginger said:
I debated between entertainment and science and went with science.

Can you see the man’s smiling face? Psychologist shows off incredible illusion

When you move the image the face appears. If you look straight at it, there is no image. It's easier to see on the larger image a short distance down the page, but it is there on the first image as well.


I don't get it.
Click to expand...
The minor movement does it and I am pretty sure it is the persistence of vision thing that lets us see a succession of different (slightly ) pictures rapidly projected as a smoothly moving image (movies).
 
It (the picture} is likely formed by the gray that only is seen where black and white alter position as the frame moves up or down. I strongly suspect a computer did the placement of the small black/white areas to maximize the effect.
 
fuelair said:
The minor movement does it and I am pretty sure it is the persistence of vision thing that lets us see a succession of different (slightly ) pictures rapidly projected as a smoothly moving image (movies).
Click to expand...
It all makes sense now, thanks everybody.

Persistence does seem to be the key I think. I can also see it just after blinking.

The explanation makes sense that the squares are not uniformly colored black or white, the brain wants to make them so. But it takes a second for the brain to change what you really see into what it thinks you see. When you look from the side, your brain is not making the correction as the pattern is not overriding what the brain actually sees.

:thumbsup:
 
fuelair said:
I strongly suspect a computer did the placement of the small black/white areas to maximize the effect.
Click to expand...
It's just a regular black and white checkered pattern. An image is then laid on top of the checkered pattern and the image opacity is set to 10%.

YmZQhCh.jpg
 
I'm quite near-sighted, and so I decided to take a look at the thing (from a distance) without my glasses on. With the checkerboard pattern all blurred out, the face is rather obvious.
 
Shepherd said:
I'm quite near-sighted, and so I decided to take a look at the thing (from a distance) without my glasses on. With the checkerboard pattern all blurred out, the face is rather obvious.
Click to expand...

Thank you. That finally worked for me. I'm also short sighted.
 
When I shrank the image down, I could see the photo when moving but it disappeared when stopped. Fun illusion.
 
My brain seems to see that the whole thing isn't just identical squares but I can't see anything in there.

ETA:
madurobob said:
Try this - download the image to your desktop. You'll see it as an icon there. Can you see the face?
Click to expand...

Barely. And that's because of GodMark2's post. The contrast differences are insanely small.
 
Last edited:
The only way I can see it is by scrolling up and down rapidly ... then when I STOP it appears as a faded photograph for a fraction of a second.
 
Argumemnon said:
My brain seems to see that the whole thing isn't just identical squares but I can't see anything in there.
Click to expand...

I had the same thing...something was there, but I couldn't quite make it out...until I took me specs off and then bingo, there he was.
 
Yeah, it's just camouflage. By moving the image, you motion-blur the checkers, exposing the image .. for me, looking from distance, thus using out-of-focus blur of my poor eyesight, works even better.
 
JesseCuster said:
So does the original optical illusion.

Here it is for reference:

[qimg]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C7fBVwJVMAAOSkx.jpg[/qimg]
Click to expand...
It is less pronounce that the image of Trump .
Interesting that I did not see color at first. Even more interesting is I have difficulty now not seeing color.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom