Ouchi
Taken from the Ouchi illusion, which is an illusion named after its inventor, Japanese artist Hajime Ouchi. In the original illusion, the central disk seems to float above the checkered background when moving the eyes around while viewing the figure. Scrolling the image horizontally or vertically, as with this animation (an action obtained by moving the mouse over and around the animated movie and the disc will follow the mouse) it offers a much stronger effect.
“The illusion is caused by random eye movements, which are independent in the horizontal and vertical directions. However, the two types of patterns in the figure nearly eliminate the effect of the eye movements parallel to each type of pattern. Consequently, the neurons stimulated by the disk convey the signal that the disk jitters due to the horizontal component of the eye movements, while the neurons stimulated by the background convey the signal that movements are due to the independent vertical component. Since the two regions jitter independently, the brain interprets the regions as corresponding to separate independent objects (Olveczky et al. 2003).”
Created in Flash