Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/03/these-boxes-arent-rotating.html
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Plot twist: they aren’t even boxes.
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The fucking wildest part is how they only appear to rotate a short distance, maybe 30deg or so, but there’s no seam in the loop. It took me a minute because when I would blink, it does feel like a jump cut, but if you can relax your eyes and keep staring it seems to somehow impossibly seamlessly continue moving a short distance in the same direction without resetting or completing a loop.
and then I started to see the short sides as being in front. Then I briefly saw the face of the universe, blacked out, then wrote this post.
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If I don’t try to focus on a particular line segment, they rotate smoothly. As soon as I try to directly follow the rotation, it starts to look instead like a cube that turns a bit and jumps back. Putting the mouse cursor next a vertex shows that nothing is moving at all.
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As much as I like these kinds of insights into the secrets of human vision, looking at the illusion made me feel queasy quite rapidly.
(On a different note, I’m pleased by how much of the accompanying Twitter post I can read now. It’s almost enough that I can’t quite understand the whole thing.)
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The first time I saw this image it was just a still and I wondered what the fuss was about, the boxes clearly were not rotating at all.
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When it’s an animated gif like this, it’s a pretty cool effect. When it’s a carefully constructed illusion of technical, cultural, and economic “progress”, I just get annoyed.
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Cool.
One can visually disrupt the illusion by picking two vertical lines of one “box” and focusing on them instead of looking at both ‘boxes’ at once.
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Cool, like a visual version of a Shepard Tone.
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I did the same thing, only with the same corner on both boxes.
Strobes make things look like they’re moving. Necker cubes look like they’re moving if you take your focus off of them. Combine strobes with Necker cubes and the shit’s gonna look like it’s moving. Nothing really unexpected here.
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Schroedinger’s HMSGoose; is HMSGoose in the box, or in an alternate universe? If we click the video the goose dies.
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