CSS Optical Illusions

(alvaromontoro.com)

224 points | by ulrischa 3 days ago ago

21 comments

  • myfonj 3 days ago ago

    These "dots appearing only while (not) focused" are known as "extinction illusions", namely

        "25 - Appearing Dots"
    
    is "McAnany's type" [1], and

        "26 - Disappearing Dots"
    
    is known as "Ninio's type" [2], according Akiyoshi Kitaoka's materials. (I have recreated them too few years ago [3][4], before getting to the source.)

    [1] https://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/akitaoka/kieru3e.html#:~:text...

    [2] https://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/akitaoka/kieru3e.html#:~:text...

    [3] https://codepen.io/myf/full/XjdmJy ( scintillation warning)

    [4] https://codepen.io/myf/full/jMqoMW ( scintillation warning)

  • hinkley 3 days ago ago

    I thought this was going to go the other way.

    Worked on a project that wanted to make everything a different grayscale color. It was out of control already when someone one day complained that two pieces of text were a different color.

    They weren’t. They were identical. But they were on two different background colors which make the optical illusion that they weren’t. And I reminded them for the twentieth time that we were using too goddamned much gray.

  • smusamashah 3 days ago ago

    This coca cola illusion is my favourite one https://gagadget.com/en/446542-a-photo-of-a-coca-cola-can-th...

    Coca cola appears red when no red at all is used in whole image

    • flexagoon 2 days ago ago

      This is a great illusion, though I often see that people try to explain this (and a similar image of strawberries) as "our brain knows this object is supposed to be red so it fills in red", which is not what's happening - it's based on color contrast like many other optical illusions

    • mediumsmart a day ago ago

      The background on the can is a very light red. I know from painting murals that a light color close up looks darker from some distance.

  • brandon_bot 3 days ago ago

    Cool!

    I did something similar for my personal favorite illusion, the Ames window illusion. Recreated with CSS: https://brandondong.github.io/blog/ames_window/

  • sandpaper26 3 days ago ago

    This is cool, but more as a demonstration of interesting CSS techniques than optical illusions in my opinion.

    Also, interestingly, I seem to be able to force myself to "see through" all of these illusions except for induced gradients, which I can't stop seeing unless I cover part of the screen.

  • 3 days ago ago
    [deleted]
  • nilslindemann 3 days ago ago

    33 - color fan: There is another interesting optical illusion here: The fan seems to rotate faster when not directly looking at it.

  • andredurao 2 days ago ago

    On #4 (White's Illusion) it looks like for me that the gray bar that is surrounded by black is brighter than the one surrounded by white instead of darker :#

  • aj7 3 days ago ago

    What would be most interesting is using optical illusions to help decode how brain visual processing is done.

  • encom 3 days ago ago

    These are all super dark, for some reason.

    • christophilus 3 days ago ago

      You have to actually run them. Otherwise, they're just a dark CodePen preview.

      • encom 3 days ago ago

        Why the extra step of having to click each one? Only a few of them are interactive.

        • d-us-vb 3 days ago ago

          Because codepens can run javascript. And if a page has 50 of them, it might make the page load time much longer. I know that all these examples are pure CSS, and maybe there is a setting in codepen to disable the "Run" button and automatically run it. Still, getting to decide is generally a better pattern than presuming that that's what the user wants, especially when the fact that the code is inside a codepen makes it explicitly not an integral function of the page. "I thought this was just a blog, and now you want me to run all this javascript??" -- some JS hater, probably.

          I appreciate getting to choose as much as possible when code runs.

          • zamadatix 3 days ago ago

            Somewhat ironically, Codepen ended up introducing the JS execution requirement to view the content.

  • moralestapia 3 days ago ago

    Wow, this is great!

    I want to put some of them in my UIs.

    • herpdyderp 3 days ago ago

      I've often run into these unintentionally messing up my UIs!

  • layer8 3 days ago ago

    Heh, I used to do these in Excel.

  • eulgro 3 days ago ago

    They could make capchas out of these.

    • hiccuphippo 2 days ago ago

      "Please select the dancers spinning to the right"