Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/19/the-two-objects-are-traveling.html
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The human visual cortex: shockingly not evolved to process tricky gifs!
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But evolution will fix that with time, right?
I assume all predators in the SnowCrash future will hide behind tricky gifs so as not to reveal their true movement.
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I, for one, welcome our new, .gif exploiting overlords.
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I will as soon as the room stops spinning.
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It’s funny how it seems like the easiest way to get a Twitter video to play is to pull it up on a cell phone.
Meanwhile, auto-playing, unmuted, CPU-hogging video advertisements start up without a hitch.
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The orange dot was pretty straightforward. The other one though, is either witchcraft or a damn dirty lie!
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Like a tiger hiding in tall grass, my friend.
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I ususally get pretty thoroughly stumped by these (I never did find that damn phone on the rug) but I was able to figure out the yellow and blue marks.
explanation:
The contrast between the blue “traveler” and the black lines is low enough that when both ends of the blue traveler are moving across the black lines, it’s difficult to see the movement, and when the ends are both against white again, you suddenly perceive a jump
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In my mind, what you’ve done here is on par with identifying the causal mechanism for gravitation.
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The links to the source media are obfuscated, but here they are:
https://pbs.twimg.com/tweet_video/ClO0qieUYAIeKjY.mp4 (blue and yellow moving rectangles)
https://pbs.twimg.com/tweet_video/ClHpXdkUYAA0cbu.mp4 (orange and gray circles)
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It’s just at the right of the right table leg.
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Same thing with yellow-on-white, so they seem to be alternating with pulling ahead.
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My favorite
The green and the blue are the same color.
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How much longer until we discover basilisks?
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Blue? There’s blue there?
(Not kidding. I cannot see blue 
)
@frauenfelder: I’m a scientist working on vision, and can recommend this website as a treasure trove of similar phenomena: http://michaelbach.de/ot/index.html
I particularly recommend motion-induced blindness (dots that you know are there disappear before your eyes), the lilac chaser illusion (stare at it for a while and all you’ll see is a green dot jumping around, except there is no green dot), and the particularly compelling demonstration of the motion aftereffect (look at your hand and it feels like things are crawling underneath your skin, look at your friend’s face and it’s hilarious).
Psychologists / neuroscientists love it when these illusions ‘fool’ us - it often tells us something about what the brain is doing computationally. The website above is maintained by a vision scientist and generally provides a referenced explanation of the illusions for if you want to find out more.
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It says ‘gif’, but it isn’t one. Let’s see if it works with a real (and non-fuzzy) gif:
Doesn’t matter
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