godspeed you! big animal

The blue and yellow blocks seem to move forward in a stepping motion, but they are in fact moving side by side with a constant speed.
The effect becomes stronger if you focus on a fixed point (the + sign) instead of following the blocks with your eyes.

A series of vertical black and white bars can be seen. A blue and yellow rectangle are moving back and forth across the bars. This creates an optical illusion that the two blocks are moving like two stepping feet, but they are in fact moving with a constant speed.

#css crimes #css animation #optical illusion #The Cohost Global Feed

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in reply to @rykarn's post:

aidan babidan @adibabidan6/25/2023, 4:29 PM

is this to do with value? my guess is that the yellow has higher value and the blue has lower value, meaning the yellow doesn’t contrast much with the white, while the blue doesn’t contrast much with the black, and so it’s difficult to tell that they’re moving when both edges of one square are in a low-contrast stripe.

rykarn @rykarn6/25/2023, 4:32 PM

Pretty much yeah, we have a hard time seeing the edges of the blocks when the colors don't have a big contrast against the background. There is a wikipedia page about this illusion explaining it.

Quilynn @qln6/26/2023, 3:15 AM

This is cool. I think for me, the effect is even more pronounced when I'm reading the text on the post, even more than staring at the +

Also it's cool that when I follow the squares, it looks to me like the yellow keeps slowing down when it hits the white bars, and catching up again at each black bar. It sort of looks like the white bars are viscous to the yellow square only! They don't look like they're "stepping" until I look away.

rykarn @rykarn6/26/2023, 4:15 PM

I like the way this one turned out because it seems like different people/creatures perceive it more easily or differently than others and I find that fascinating!

Quilynn @qln6/27/2023, 1:44 AM

Neat!

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