A lot of people in my last video were asking me how the optical illusion worked.
How we were able to make something look like it was moving around, without any special
effects.
Just papers like this and transparencies like this are able to do things like this and this.
So in this video I'm going to be explaining to you guys how this works...
In a Nutshell.
That is an optical illusion.
Our vision is being fooled into thinking that something is moving.
And its not just our vision.
Pretty much all of our senses can be fooled.
For example the sense of taste.
If you put a couple drops of food coloring into a glass of milk and have people try to
identify what the taste is they can sometimes drink the entire glass
without knowing what it is, even though the food coloring doesn't really change the taste
of milk.
Our sense of balance can be fooled.
Trying walking around in a haunted house that has a steady floor but the walls are moving
around you.
Your sense of balance is going to be thrown off and you're going to stumble a little bit.
Your sense of touch can be fooled.
If you hold two tubes containing warm water and cold water at the same time, you can feel
a burning sensation in your hand, even though neither of those are hot water.
There are auditory illusions like this one.
There are like 10 hour long videos here on YouTube with the Shepard Tone.
It feels like the notes are rising and rising forever, but really, its a 30 second loop.
Cut that.
It makes me feel all weird.
Even your sense of smell can be fooled.
If you give a bunch of people a box of menthol and you tell half of them that it's mint and
half of them that it's medicine; the people who think it's mint, think that
it smells a lot better.
So all of your sense can be fooled, but optical illusions are definitely the most striking.
Believe it or not, optical illusions are something that you learn throughout your whole life.
They're not something that's inherent to you.
We know this because of blind people who have regained their vision later in life.
Like a guy called Sydney Bradford.
He lost his vision when he was a baby, but he had a cornea transplant when he was 50
years old.
Most optical illusions didn't work for him.
So every day that you're out gathering new information with your eyes, makes it so that
you can see more and more optical illusions.
A lot of illusions, like this kind of unsettling one, mess with the way that your brain views
things.
Like the fact that this yellow line looks a lot bigger than this yellow line, when really,
they're the same size.
Or the fact that seeing a bunch of pac-men together makes you see a white square.
Or that this circle looks a lot smaller than this circle, even though they are the same
size.
That messes with the way that your brain is interpreting that information.
This illusion here works a little bit differently.
Your brain isn't mis-processing or misunderstanding the information that you're giving it.
This is based on a phenomenon of they eye called persistence of vision.
Any image that you see stays in your retina for a fraction of a second.
That's actually how videos work.
Right now you're seeing about 24 frames every single second.
It kind of looks like my hand is moving left and right,
even though it's just a sequence of images.
To illustrate how this works, imagine a sheet of alternating colors.
Green, red, green, red, etc.
Now imagine a Moray pattern over every other bar, like this.
If I slide the pattern over the colors, I get flashes of green and red and green and
red etc.
Now let's add another color: yellow.
Let's make our pattern cover every other two bars.
When we slide it, we get the same effect: red, green yellow.
We can add even more colors.
Let's try six different colors.
You can see all of the colors separately.
Your brain assumes the colors have to continue underneath the black bars.
Now instead of simple colors, we have six frames of animation.
One, two, three, four, five, six.
Six separate frames that connect at the end of each other.
It loops forever and ever.
Like a GIF, GIF, like an animation.
So imagine we take one of these images and we put our pattern over that.
Then we could cut that out and our animation still works.
We still have six frames of animation that can be spread out throughout the page, like
this.
So now, by moving our black Moray pattern over it, we can create the illusion of motion.
It kind of works a little bit like my zoetrope video where it's a looping animation that
keeps going on and on and on.
Here's another animation with a treble clef.
If I slide these around, you can see that the treble clef and I are dancing around.
There's a company that calls this scanimation.
"Scanimation is what makes the books come to life."
They've done children's books, Star Wars memorabilia, lamps, there's even a rug/table combo thing,
that gives you the illusion of a koi pond as you move around it.
And that's how it works.
Of course I first saw it on a friend of mine's video.
His name is brusspup.
I'll put a link down below for you to check out some more of these kinds of animations.
If you want to make your own real life gif or gif, however you want to say it, a link
down below that automatically does it for you.
So that's it.
Thank you so much for watching this video.
Let me know if you want to see some more of these kinds of videos where I explain the
science-y things behind what I'm doing.
Speaking of science-y things, I have a question for you.
Is the air inside of something like a bell pepper any different from the normal air that
we breathe?
That's my question to you.
Let me know in the comments below if you figure that out.
I'll see you guys later.