2016's Illusion of the Year will make you cover your screen with fingerprints

Cory Doctorow 1:33 pm Wed Jul 6, 2016

The winners in this year's Illusion of the Year contest (previously) are all cool, but it took me a minute to figure out what was going on with the grand prize winner, Mathew T. Harrison and Gideon P. Caplovitz's "Motion Integration Unleashed: New Tricks for an Old Dog."

When I got it, I was gobsmacked. Now my screen is covered in fingerprints from my holding my finger over the corners of the shapes to verify that they don't move!

Previous illusions have demonstrated that drifting Gabors that translate across the visual field can appear to move in the wrong direction (i.e. in a direction that is different than the actual translation). Here we show that configurations of drifting Gabors that are stationary can give rise to dramatic global motion percepts: a rotating square, oscillating chopsticks and rolling waves. Although the Gabors themselves are not changing position, the drifting motion within them causes the illusion that the entire configuration is moving!

Motion Integration Unleashed: New Tricks for an Old Dog
[Mathew T. Harrison and Gideon P. Caplovitz/Illusion of the Year]

(via Metafilter)

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