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“Pigeon Neck” Illusion (2014)
- xwdv 4y agoJesus, this illusion is so powerful, you’d have to have a very poorly optimized brain to really see anything else.
- sneak 4y agoI can consciously toggle the illusion on or off.
- mafuyu 4y agoYeah, this effect is pretty strong. After staring at it a bit, the only way I found to 'break' it was by noticing that if I flicked my eyes towards a bird, there was a brief period before the illusion kicked in. By constantly flicking my eyes between each bird, I was able to perceive them as moving linearly.
- ancientworldnow 4y agoThey're just sliding smoothly for me unless I look at it without any focus as a disinterested viewer. I work on fixing moving pixels all day though so maybe I'm not an average subject.
- cornstalks 4y agoIt took me several minutes before I could see the illusion. I just saw grey rectangles and pigeons smoothly moving to the right and had no idea what the “illusion” was supposed to be.
- glasss 4y agoWhen I started messing with the color I ran into that. If I shifted to a different grey, it just looked smooth to me. But either extreme, black or white, and the illusion was there.
- viraptor 4y agoNow I wonder how much it depends on the gamma. I understand there's some differences depending on the hardware, browser and image format/metadata. By default we may all see a different shade of grey, affecting how much of an illusion we get. Edit: checked Firefox and Chrome on Android and they look exactly the same (work on me). Low brightness works better than full brightness.
- cornstalks 4y agoThat’s certainly a possible factor. I’m on an iPhone 14 Pro with brightness at medium levels in an averagely lit room using Safari. I just tried on my Mac’s XDR display and it’s similar: I can either see or not see the illusion (now that I know what the illusion looks like I can turn it on/off in my head).
- WarOnPrivacy 4y ago> It took me several minutes before I could see the illusion. I just saw grey rectangles and pigeons smoothly moving to the right and had no idea what the “illusion” was supposed to be. Same here. After a bit I could see some worm stretching if I focused on particular points in the image. I noticed that as soon as I registered all of the movement, my eyes fixed a certain way that they do when I'm driving and navigating an overly complex traffic situation. I was super reluctant to try to focus them any other way.
- eyelidlessness 4y agoI see it, but it doesn’t feel optimal. What my brain is telling me I see is different from what I know is true about what’s on the screen. It seems to be interpolating between nearly and actually overlapping with each alternating stripe. There are a lot of ways it’s optimal to be able to approximate and fill in details like this with normal visual processing, but literally not being able to unsee falsehoods (and I can’t switch it off in my brain like another commenter said they could) doesn’t feel like one of those optimal scenarios to me.
- xwdv 4y agoA highly optimized brain doesn’t bother wasting time on getting fine details like this correct, it’s too slow and will lead you to getting killed in situations where a rough approximation of what you are seeing is good enough. People have to focus very hard to turn off the optimizations and see what is really going on, some can’t do it at all. Some people seem to be able to see the smooth linear motion by default, perhaps descendants of those who lived in simpler environments.
- cornstalks 4y agoWhy do you think it takes more time and brain power to see the rectangles and pigeons correctly (smooth movement)? It was instantaneous and natural for me. I’m not convinced by your logic. It doesn’t seem like a disadvantage for a brain to naturally register the image correctly rather than being fooled by an illusion, especially when it takes zero effort.
- eyelidlessness 4y agoI agree with you. (I think people like to call this “steel man” or whatever but just generally applying a charitable interpretation…) I think their take on optimization is about falsehoods about reality that our brains assimilate to make functioning or survival possible under certain circumstances, like perceiving magenta as not-green or being able to observe a field of grass without being hyper aware of each blade of grass within it. All of which is good insofar as it actually serves us, but it’s really weird to me to frame it so absolutely. It’s not an optimization if it doesn’t serve us and we’re just misperceiving reality for no purpose, and there’s nothing wrong with you or anyone else who doesn’t. If anything it’s just… “wow, electrified meat evolved to be conscious is really wacky and super subjective!”
- kerpotgh 4y ago[dead]
- aoeusnth1 4y agoBoth me and my wife had to consciously blur our vision to see the illusion.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- stefncb 4y agoIf I look directly at a point, the illusion goes away there. And I don't really see anything strong anyway, so I wonder how you see it.
- clhodapp 4y agoSomething I noticed and got a kick from: If you set the color to black or white then the real motion and the illusion are indistinguishable.
- dawatchusay 4y agoI don’t feel this is much of an illusion. I think you just can’t see the movement of gray on black. Or maybe this is what illusions are in a very simple form?
- TylerE 4y agoPretty much. Change the color to yellow and it’s very obvious.
- yazzku 4y agoYellow doesn't do it for me. But orange, oh boy.
- anamexis 4y agoHow would you define what an optical/visual illusion is?
- c3534l 4y agoWhen your brain fudges the results of what you're seeing because of some hidden processing heuristic. If the bird were actually just colored black, then what we would see would be accurate. But its presented as if we should percieve continuous movement when we really shouldn't.
- dawatchusay 4y agoI’m just saying upon initial thought that it seemed too simple to be considered an “illusion” because it doesn’t rely on some mental trickery, just blindness. But I’m willing to accept that optical illusions may all rely on some form of blindness. Glad to spawn the conversation!
- thomassmith65 4y agoLet's say you recreate this effect by painting the pigeons onto a transparency sheet, and moving the sheet above a paper with a striped background. The pigeon shapes would appear to bend, when in fact they do not... so in physical form, it clearly is an illusion. As a pixelated image, I dunno: our insistence on viewing groups of pixels as shapes is an illusion to start with.
- illegalmemory 4y agoIt would have been interesting to control the width of the vertical stripes too , to see at what point it "starts" being a illusion. I assume for very thin stripes it might not work so well .
- d4mi3n 4y agoI was in bed reading this with an eye closed and was very confused until I discovered the illusion works for me only when I watch it with both eyes open. I found this surprising—I know three dimensional optical illusions depend on focus and perspective, but I was unaware two dimensional optical illusions were as well.
- soxocx 4y agoThats interesting. I see it with either or both eyes.
- PyWoody 4y agoTry closing one eye and tilting your head 90°
- kerpotgh 4y agoI can see it irrespective of how many eyes are open or any tilt angle.
- javawizard 4y agoSo you can see it with zero eyes open? ;) I also see it with any number (>= 1) of eyes open and at any angle. Wonder if GP's phone was on night shift or something similar - the article mentions that color changes impact the illusion's visibility.
- tolmasky 4y agoHey, this is built with Cappuccino!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- albert_e 4y agoThe illusion was very strong on my mobile screen and non-existent on my desktop screen. The screen calibration was different in the latter I believe so the pigeons were appearing as a slightly different colored grey blocks visually distinct from the vertical bars.
- jrumbut 4y agoFunny, I still get the illusion after turning the pigeons every color from dark grey to bright yellow. Brighter colors make it a bit less strong but still very much there.
- Enginerrrd 4y agoOn my laptop, I am only able to see the illusion if I looked at the striped background and blur my vision a little. Then it is quite impressive and strong. Otherwise, it always appears perfectly smooth for all colors.
- daveslash 4y agoI get the illusion for yellow, but not for bright red or blue. That's interesting....
- aliqot 4y agoI get what I'm supoosed to see but i dont see it, its pixels gliding continuously.
- userbinator 4y agoThis seems to be, for lack of a better analogy, an effect of rounding colour intensities in the "motion compensation" processing of the brain. The grey and black become perceived as identical and thus no motion is detected in those areas where the two colours are overlapping.
- sorokod 4y agoI wonder what is the maximal extent of the craining and the shrinking illusion that can be achieved. Is it to do with the velocity? The grid thiknes? If the illusion is an error, what maximizes it?
- bella_sm 4y agoDaVinci would have loved this!
- newaccount74 4y agoHere's my attempt at explaining this phenomenon: Our Retinas don't send raw data to our brain like a camera sensor would. Instead, the neurons in the retina already do some pre-processing, like boundary detection, or movement detection. The brain then receives signals where movement was detected. This movement detection is basically just detecting changes in light level, so it works better when the contrast is high (dark gray vs. white) and works less good when contrast is low (dark grey vs black). So our brain gets stronger "movement" signals when there is high contrast, and it looks like the part that has high contrast is moving faster. Since the image is designed in a way that the boundary of head/body always have low/high contrast or vice versa, it seems they are moving with different speeds.
- zestyping 4y agoThis isn't an illusion at all. Things that are too dark to see... are too dark to see. Nothing to see here, move along.