A ‘ROVING WINDOW’ optical illusion from the 1970s has gone viral.
A stunning vintage Australian television video of a show called The Curiosity Show shows a presenter demonstrating the Ames window illusion.
The clip was recently posted on Twitter and has been viewed millions of times.
The illusion involves a cut-out window shape that the handler spins on a string.
When you look closely, your brain doesn’t interpret the window turning 360 degrees as it really is.
Instead, the window appears to oscillate, which means it appears to rock back and forth at a regular rate, but it doesn’t rotate all the way.
The illusion is even stranger when the male host glues a pencil to the window and demonstrates how his brain can see the pencil spinning but not the shape of the window.
The pen seems to go through the window frame while spinning as if by magic.
A Twitter user commented: “Now if you see it focus on, say, a corner, following it with the pencil, you can see it, but then you look towards the center and it’s back in mad town.”
The Ames Window is named after Adelbert Ames Jr., who discovered it in 1947.
Our brains are tricked because the window has a strange trapezoidal shape, but we try to perceive it as a normal window as it rotates.
The revolving window is not aligned with normal perspective changes, so we interpret it as wobble.
The science behind optical illusions
This brief explanation can help you untangle your brain…
- Optical illusions make a little more sense when you learn that our eyes have very little to do with what we see and that it is our brain that plays a key role in creating images and trying to protect us from potential threats around us.
- Our brain is constantly trying to understand the world at the fastest rate even though the world is in 3D and the images on our retina are in 2D.
- It can be very difficult for your brain to interpret everything at once, so it will often take shortcuts and give you a simplified version of what you’re seeing so you can react faster if the object you’re looking at seems dangerous.
- When you look at an object, what you actually see is light bouncing back into your eye, converted into electrical impulses that your brain then converts into an image.
- Our brains can distort straight lines if an object in the way seems to be getting closer because it wants to emphasize a potential threat.
- Different colors, light and dark can make objects of the same size look different, or make patterned images appear to be spinning.
For more brain teasers, CAN you identify the fourth person drinking whiskey in this amazing optical illusion?
And this couple took photos on their new couch and accidentally created an optical illusion that made it look like they switched heads.
Also, this woman was horrified after her ‘cute’ bikini photo went viral for showing off her ‘penis’.
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Categories: Optical Illusion
Source: tiengtrunghaato.edu.vn