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“Pigeon Neck” Illusion (2014)
- 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?
- tomelders 4y agoI feel like this is doing what an animator would do, just badly.
- 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.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y agoHow is viewing an image on a screen an illusion? There really is an image there when viewed at the intended scale.
- thomassmith65 4y agoThe image is a grid of pixels. When a group of the pixels that the human viewer perceives as a worm appears to grow, we cannot claim that the pixels in the overlap actually belong to the background. It is equally valid to claim they belong to the worm, in which case... the worm actually has lengthened.
- thfuran 4y agoYes, but the illusion occurs when the worm/pigeon and the grid aren't actually the same color.
- thomassmith65 4y agoIn the physical version, if the worm/pigeon and the grid are exactly the same color, we still consider them separate entities. In the digital version, if a group of pixels appears to be part of some object, that's as good a reason as any to argue it is part of that object (though strictly speaking, it's a meaningless question since it's just a bunch of pixels).
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
- kuhewa 4y agoWith the pigeons it seemed illusory, but with just worms you can tell that's exactly whats happening. Dunno if it is the single-row shape or just less action on the screen allowing you to focus on one cell
- jameshart 4y agoPlay with the color of the pigeons. Slide it all the way to black, and it's no longer an illusion - the edges really do move in steps. Slide it all the way to white and the same effect appears in the inverse. Somewhere in between, there are shades of gray where the smooth movement of the pigeons is visible. And there are shades of gray where your brain can't separate it from the underlying black motion. That's interesting, no? That's what makes all optical illusions interesting - exploring the thresholds where our brain's perceptual machinery takes shortcuts. I've noticed there's a tendency, especially among smart people, to be dismissive of optical illusions. 'I didn't fall for it' - because to a certain personality, it's important to feel like your mind can understand things and you can't be 'fooled'. But good optical illusions aren't fooling you. You don't need to feel defensive about whether you were 'tricked'. They're hacks that exploit edge cases in your visual cortex, and cause your brain to be fed erroneous data. They're interesting and useful because they help you calibrate the instruments your brain uses to collect data!
- the_af 4y ago> Slide it all the way to black For the record: the illusion still works for me if I slide the color all the way to black. One eye, both eyes, it always works for me.
- maegul 4y agoFor me, just with the color slider, there was nearly always some sort of illusory motion. Transparent perception of the actual motion of the pigeons was either impossible or required precise conditions, which really affirms the power of this effect.
- IshKebab 4y agoNot really - he's saying when it's fully black there is no illusion. The chicken is really moving like that.
- mannykannot 4y agoOn the other hand, with black-on-black, the idea that there is something representing a moving pigeon is a sort of illusion in itself, as you infer a boundary that you never see in full. On the third hand, movement is an illusion in all cases: what's really happening is that static pixels are changing color and brightness (the pixels may jitter slightly in changing color, but that's not the motion we perceive.) All these views seem to me to be reasonable, they are just different perspectives.
- justinpombrio 4y agoI'm confused what you think an illusion is?
- tshaddox 4y agoThere is room for disagreement in some cases. “Look how the black text becomes invisible when it goes in front of a black background” is not what I would call an optical illusion, for instance.
- justinpombrio 4y agoI would describe an illusion as something where my (say) visual cortex is lying to me. This results in an image looking very odd: I _know_ that one thing is happening, but it looks like something else is happening. Black text going in front of a black background doesn't have that effect. My knowledge of what I'm seeing agrees with what I see. My knowledge is "there is black text in front of that black text", and my visual cortex says "sure, I can't see it but that's perfectly plausible". This pigeon video does have that effect. My knowledge says that the pigeon image is moving smoothly, but I can clearly see its head bobbing; there's a disagreement. Do other people define "illusion" differently? Or perceive something differently?
- lupire 4y agoIt's th e same illusion as someone walking out a door and somehow teleporting to another door after they walked around outside.
- aidenn0 4y agoThe color stepping feet version[1] I think definitely qualifies. The color contrast is high enough that if you focus on the leading or trailing edge of the "feet" it's trivial to see its moving the whole time, but if you look at the entire thing as a whole, the "stepping" effect appears. 1: https://michaelbach.de/ot/mot-feetLin/index.html https://michaelbach.de/ot/mot-feetLin/index.html
- IshKebab 4y ago
- aliqot 4y agoI get what I'm supoosed to see but i dont see it, its pixels gliding continuously.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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....
- 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.