4 ms·

Does anyone know how the hell this works

shrinks99 11mo ago
You can see everything in your field of vision, but the area DIRECTLY in the centre has the highest level of detail. This image has high frequency animated details that are not cognisized equally by your entire FOV. The animated bit right in the middle at any given time is where your brain processes the most detail and also where you are looking.
- BriggyDwiggs42 11mo ago
  Oh cool so it’s about the frequency?
  - robotresearcher 11mo ago
    Spatial frequency, ie. small detailed things, not temporal frequency (in this example).
- Peteragain 11mo ago
  I had to think about it, but are you saying all the stars are animated to rotate, but the amount they move between frames is too small for you to see unless it's in your fovea?
  - pxndxx 11mo ago
    They are tiny and the ones not on your fovea don't register enough "pixels" for your brain to recognise the rotation.
  - Sharlin 11mo ago
    They're just so small that you only see shapeless blur outside your fovea. If you applied an artificial blur filter to the whole screen, you'd also not see any movement anymore because all high-resolution detail is removed. A 3x3 box blur will erase differences between X X X X and X X X X X
retrac 11mo ago
Most of what you think you are seeing at any moment is only imagined. The retina is not uniform. Most photosensitive cells (cones) are near the centre of vision. Peripheral vision has little resolving power. Can't make out fine details. The reality of this is much more extreme than it subjectively feels like. The eye doesn't actually have pixels but if it did they'd all be focused at the centre. Like an image where 10% of the area in the middle had 80% of the pixels. At the centre of vision the eye has enough resolving power to make out the tiny star shapes and see that they are rotating. Outside of that narrow zone in the peripheral vision they're perceived as coloured blobs, at best. Normally your brain would make this transparent to you. But this is an unusual pattern. Your visual cortex doesn't realize all the stars should be rotating. So only the ones you can actually see at any one instant seem to rotate. Try to look at an object in the room with you, such as a lamp, without looking at it directly. Observe it out of the corner of your eye. The more you try, the less sharply defined it will seem. At the very edge of your vision you're only getting a handful of pixels worth of colour information. But because you know it is a lamp, it has the sharpness of a lamp's definition even though you cannot actually see that definition without directly looking at it. That's a related illusion. This is why the eye scans constantly in those micro-jerking motions known as saccades. If a face were to pop up on your display, it would feel like a single instant recognition of a person. But before you experience that the eye would scan over the eyes, mouth, nose and so on, several times, in sharp flicking motions, over about 100 milliseconds, and these dozen or so little snapshots, as it were, would be stitched together into the whole image of a face. Even though only a tiny slice of the eye, or the nose, etc. can actually be seen at any one time, you perceive the whole face. This illusion hacks that and reveals how narrow our high-resolution vision really is. The whole visual field feels rather high resolution. But only that tiny spot where they rotate actually is.
- dotancohen 11mo ago
  Is it a problem if the shape that I see rising stars in is not round? I get an upside down L shaped mass of rotating stars, no matter where I look in the image.
  - AlecSchueler 11mo ago

You can see everything in your field of vision, but the area DIRECTLY in the centre has the highest level of detail. This image has high frequency animated details that are not cognisized equally by your entire FOV. The animated bit right in the middle at any given time is where your brain processes the most detail and also where you are looking.

BriggyDwiggs42 11mo ago
Oh cool so it’s about the frequency?
- robotresearcher 11mo ago
  Spatial frequency, ie. small detailed things, not temporal frequency (in this example).
Peteragain 11mo ago
I had to think about it, but are you saying all the stars are animated to rotate, but the amount they move between frames is too small for you to see unless it's in your fovea?
- pxndxx 11mo ago
  They are tiny and the ones not on your fovea don't register enough "pixels" for your brain to recognise the rotation.
- Sharlin 11mo ago
  They're just so small that you only see shapeless blur outside your fovea. If you applied an artificial blur filter to the whole screen, you'd also not see any movement anymore because all high-resolution detail is removed. A 3x3 box blur will erase differences between X X X X and X X X X X

retrac 11mo ago

Most of what you think you are seeing at any moment is only imagined. The retina is not uniform. Most photosensitive cells (cones) are near the centre of vision. Peripheral vision has little resolving power. Can't make out fine details. The reality of this is much more extreme than it subjectively feels like. The eye doesn't actually have pixels but if it did they'd all be focused at the centre. Like an image where 10% of the area in the middle had 80% of the pixels. At the centre of vision the eye has enough resolving power to make out the tiny star shapes and see that they are rotating. Outside of that narrow zone in the peripheral vision they're perceived as coloured blobs, at best. Normally your brain would make this transparent to you. But this is an unusual pattern. Your visual cortex doesn't realize all the stars should be rotating. So only the ones you can actually see at any one instant seem to rotate. Try to look at an object in the room with you, such as a lamp, without looking at it directly. Observe it out of the corner of your eye. The more you try, the less sharply defined it will seem. At the very edge of your vision you're only getting a handful of pixels worth of colour information. But because you know it is a lamp, it has the sharpness of a lamp's definition even though you cannot actually see that definition without directly looking at it. That's a related illusion. This is why the eye scans constantly in those micro-jerking motions known as saccades. If a face were to pop up on your display, it would feel like a single instant recognition of a person. But before you experience that the eye would scan over the eyes, mouth, nose and so on, several times, in sharp flicking motions, over about 100 milliseconds, and these dozen or so little snapshots, as it were, would be stitched together into the whole image of a face. Even though only a tiny slice of the eye, or the nose, etc. can actually be seen at any one time, you perceive the whole face. This illusion hacks that and reveals how narrow our high-resolution vision really is. The whole visual field feels rather high resolution. But only that tiny spot where they rotate actually is.

dotancohen 11mo ago
Is it a problem if the shape that I see rising stars in is not round? I get an upside down L shaped mass of rotating stars, no matter where I look in the image.
- AlecSchueler 11mo ago