If you stare at this image, it allegedly "disappears"

I stared into my monitor until my motivation and productivity disappeared. Very cool.

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Worst. Simpson’s couch gag. Ever.

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This is called Troxler fading (look it up). This should work for most people, you just have to make it very big or hold it close to your eyes.

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Took two attempts but that is amazing … or so I thought until I went back and realized it was an animated GIF.

For better results:

1- close an eye;
2- move your mouse cursor in front of the image
3- stare at the immobile cursor.

steps 2 and 1 can be interverted.

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Exactly. There isn’t an image to begin with, so ha ha!

This one sort of works for me. But if I go the the source (the optillusion tumblr/twitter) about half the ‘optical illusions’ are not optical illusions but just captions stating untrue things about images.

I can’t really put a finger on it if is a (rather subtle ) troll, or someone just blindly copying ‘optical illusions’ from other sources without checking.

I can’t tell if it works because after about only ten seconds I get bored and wonder “OK, when is this supposed to start working?” How long are you supposed to stare, anyway?

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I think it might work better if there were a black dot or something in the middle to stare at. Using the mouse cursor was a good suggestion, @lutzray.

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Still better than the eye-mouth swaps. :wink:

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This shows the photopsins becoming exhausted. If you shift your eyes it all comes back. Pretty cool effect, and nice demonstration of visual physiology.

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it’s a schooner!

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In fact if you could hold your eyes completely still, whatever you were looking at would disappear. Of course you can’t do that because the muscles that control your eye constantly tremor as all our muscles do. Usually this trick is done with a uniform field over the eye (half a ping pong ball will do), the idea being that even if your eye moves the image doesn’t change appreciably.

This image likely works because it is very unfocused. Tiny muscle movements likely don’t trigger a refresh. If you are not seeing this illusion it’s probably because your eye is drifting about; stick a tiny dot in the middle of it on your screen, stare at that and it should work.

That’s not the source for this image.
The Optillusions tumblr started out as an amusing parody site. But now it’s rarely updated, and when it is, it’s rarely funny.

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Sorta works for me - everything but the yellow bits disappears, kind of the way if you stare at a colour square for a while then look at a whiteboard you see an afterimage, only is this case it’s a white afterimage while you’re still staring at it.

Me, as well, but only when I take off my glasses. So y’all may want to get checked for astigmatism. With my glasses it disappreared rather quickly.

my monitor has a speck and i involuntarily focused on the speck and realized i really need to clean my monitor and … holy mother forking shirt balls the image is go … oh wait its back

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Yeah, I got it to work by just staring at one spot in the middle. I’m not sure what made me think that was the key, but it definitely worked. First the red went, then the blue, I twitched away before the yellow was quite gone and it all came back.

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Ah, good point. I do have astigmatism but wear contact lenses and they don’t correct that

It starts to disappear colour by colour for me.