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A half-decade after “the dress” divided the nation — was it white and gold or blue with black? — another illusion is capitalizing on optical color trickery.
Created by the University of Tokyo’s Haruaki Fukuda, this illusion shows how colors can change depending on perceived motion direction. In this case, if you see the dots moving in a downward direction, they will appear to be red and green. If you see them moving left to right, they will look yellow.
Like those annoying “magic eye” pictures where you have to blur your vision just right to see the three-dimensional image, it might take some effort to see the dots moving in both directions:
But that one only earned the runner-up prize in the Neural Correlate Society’s 15th annual best-illusion-of-the-year competition, which hands out thousands of dollars to the brain benders that garner the most online votes.
This year’s winner comes from Frank Force, who describes himself as a “game developer, designer, coder, artist, musician, Buddhist, and friend to cats.”
His creation, the “Dual Axis Illusion,” is blowing minds across YouTube GOOG, +1.02% GOOGL, +1.01% , where it recently broke into the top 10 trending videos. The spinning shape appears to be rotating around the horizontal and vertical axis at the same time. It can even look to be rotating in opposite directions, depending how you see it.
Force told Scientific American he discovered the illusion by accident when he came across Lissajous/Bowditch curves while making generative art.
“The underlying math equations to form this are themselves ambiguous in terms of rotation, so it is interesting how our mind is unable to deal with this and settles into a picture about what direction and axis it is rotating,” he said. “Also, our mind pictures it as a 3D object while there is nothing actually happening that is 3D.”
