1y ago

Illusory Rule

49 comments

My god is there a way to like see it properly???
- There's not; your eyes see the vague white lines formed by the lighter boxes, but when they're in your peripheral vision your brain is filling in the missing information, and because they're so close in location, colour, and thickness to the straight lines, your brain conflates the two. This results in exaggerating the white lines so you're more aware of them than when you're looking straight at them and can see the outlines of the white boxes clearly, and the white and green lines seem to blend when they're both in your peripheral vision.
  
  I've got a bit of a hangover, or maybe I'm still drunk, I dunno, but when I look at the center of the image and focus, all the lines go straight. I'm also on a phone, so maybe not enough is in my peripheral vision to completely fuck me up.
  EDIT: It was definitely the alcohol. I'm more sober now and I can't do it anymore.
- I find going out of focus makes the grid appear straight
  
  It does make it a little better yee
- Look at the white zigzags, they're what trick your brain. If you switch to the square lines after keeping the white zigzags in mind you should be able to see both and your brain doesn't switch back and forth between them.
- I opened the image in an editor and replaced the yellow lines with red ones, which made the lines look a lot straighter. I think the illusion comes from the color of the yellow interacting with lines suggested by the white background "pebbles".
- Close one eye and tilt your phone away from you slightly

Hahahaha, you dumb bastards.
It's not a schooner... it's a Sailboat.
- A schooner IS a sailboat.
  
  You know what? There is NO Easter Bunny! Over there, that's just a guy in a suit!

This is hurting my head
- Yeah, it makes me dizzy

I'm curious if this relies on the fact that we're looking at on pixelated screens to work. But not so curious that I'll print it out to check.
- As far as I know it relies on the fact that you only have clear vision in the central 20% of you FoV, and your brain just makes the rest up. Also the big blind spot
  
  I thought it was 2°? A dime held out at arms length if I recall.
- I've seen this illusion on paper and it still works. Not that printed paper is functionally different from pixels.
  
  Ha, good point. I'm showing my age here. I understand our modern phone screens have resolution approaching that of good print, but when I think of a screen my brain still defaults to something like a 14" VGA at 57PPI :-)

That's clever as hell. It's been a long time since I've seen a new illusion.
- I thought the exact same thing. Always fun to find a new way my brain can be tricked.

Oh god I'm going to barf

OpenStreetMap editors hate this trick

American suburbs

Nah fuck that how does that even work
Edit: never mind figured it out: the "random buildings" aren't random but rather build alternative paths that you only really see in your peripheral vision
- Pretty much any optical illusion that involves "random" patterns actually involves pseudorandom noise, just like adversarial generative networks use tailored pseudorandom noise to fool the discriminator.
  
  Also I never really thought of it that way, but now I'm imagining all of those "the ai thinks this is a bus" things as alien optical illusions.

Wait what's the illusion?
- The random-looking black and white "buldings" on each block have some very not random "curves" of contiguous white buildings. When you look at other parts of the image, your peripheral vision may interpret these white curves as the same thing as the perpendicular green "roads", giving the illusion that the roads are no longer all perpendicular when you look away.