Slashdot Mirror
The Goggles, They Do Nothing
Suchetha writes "In anticipation of a slow news day i would like to direct the Slashdot hordes to Akiyoshi Kitaoka's Optical Illusions page. The page also has explanations on why/how they occur (in icky PDF format). The page is on a .jp uni server so they SHOULD be able to handle the herd of rhinos that is ./."
Use the cache so more people can see! Thanks!
Caution: This page contains some works of "anomalous motion illusion", which might make sensitive observers dizzy or sick. Should you feel dizzy, you had better leave this page immediately.
Some of the pictures on this website can cause dizziness or might possibly epileptic seizures. The latter happens when the brain can't handle the conflicting information from your two eyes. If you start feeling unwell when using this website, immediately cover one eye with your hand and then leave the page. Do not close your eyes because that can make the attack worse.
Shouldn't this be posted on it.slashdot.org?
The page is on a .jp uni server so they SHOULD be able to handle the herd of rhinos that is ./.
:)
He should have called us a "herd of nerds"
-thewldisntenuff
My MythTV HowTo
Where is fallout boy?!
It's nearly dead. That is what you get for tempting fate in your fscking summary. ;->
"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along."
they SHOULD be able to handle the herd of rhinos that is ./.
/.. , right?
you mean
Some of these are on display on out-of-the-way doors in the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco. It looked like some of the staff members had printed them out and posted them there for their own personal satisfaction, but a lot of the visitors were finding themselves distracted from the bigger attractions to stare at these.
It was trippy to have the spinning snakes one as my wallpaper for some time, but at six by four feet, it really does begin to make you a little dizzy.
I thought it was News for Nerds. Stuff that matters, not Stuff to distract me on a Sunday afternoon.
let's try ascii art .o. o.oo .o. o. .o o.
. o.o.. o.o
if you shake your head you can see the dots moving!
and no headache! w00t!
sure, today is a slow news day, what boring. gee.
Here here
"The page is on a .jp uni server so they SHOULD be able to handle the herd of rhinos that is ./." Or Not.
I'm in cafe nursing a severe hangover. That shit almost made me yak all over my laptop.
Hmmmm new wallpaper... :) Imagine your whole house (exterior and interior!) with wallpaper like that...!
:( Slow news day they say?
Interesting stuff, but sadly nothing new really
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
R(k)
doesnt mean its just running on some guys pentium2 in his office. /. to hell, btw.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Because I could...nay..have found myself staring at these for periods, and assummed I will get a bit of headache, of that they are bad for my vision (thus forcing myself to stop).
"You know you don't act like a scientist, you're more like a game show host." Dana Barret
It's been posted on /. for less than 20 minutes and it's already /.'d. So much for Japanese immunity to the /. effect.
/dev/random
Yes, your eyes will shortly fall out of their sockets.
Hopefully you're able to read this before that happens.
... who is coming in to a new background image on their machine.
Some of these images have been copied elsewhere. Google Image Search shows some of the pictures, such as rotsnake2.gif
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
doesnt mean it ISNT just running...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
"The page is on a .jp uni server so they SHOULD be able to handle the herd of rhinos that is ./."
Baby vs Rhino.
That baby... er server doesn't have a prayer.
Chairs are for sitting, PDF is for printing
And a Japanese University server is probably quite likely to be able to handle a Slashdotting (although it looked like it was feeling the strain when I clicked through).
C-x C-s C-x k
that would be a japanese university server. you must be american.
Yeeeeeeek the pain! It really hurts my brain to look at this stuff, but at the same time it's awesome! Thanks for shareing. It isn't as bad as the ones they have at the museaum.
My name is a variety of floral rose, and no, it's not blue
what the hell is a ".jp uni server" and why is pdf icky?
Japanese University. As for the pdf, michael has a grudge agaisnt Adobe or something. Who knows, who cares?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
As always, mirrors are here: MirrorDot.
~Jay
jp uni means a university in Japan, and pdf is icky because it is a cross-platform well defined spec that produces beautifully printed output. Oh wait... :P (just don't get the adobe plugin anywhere near any of my browsers; I'll download it, and I don't even mind viewing it with Adobe Reader or Acrobat reader, but the plugins always seem to crash any browsers I use (MSIE, Firefox, Netscape, etc))
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
.jp means it's a japanese. A uni server means the server is part of a university, which are always connected to very high-bandwidth internet connections (the proverbial 'phat pipes'). And pdf's are icky becuase they're a closed format which take up too much space, are reader-unfriendly and are only suitable to print...and seeing as we're on the internet and like tree's, why post stuff you wanna read once and then forget in a format meant to be printed?
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Check out the awesome images of Japan/Kyoto. IMNSHO, they're far more interesting than the optical illusion stuff.
Thanks for making them available, Mr Kitaoka.
I would like to Slashdot a server that hosts a large number of images. That should spice things up.
One clue for you.
xpdf
Of course, I had to chew my arm off in the morning, so maybe it wasn't helped
Only on /. does a Simpson's quote get mangled in the headling.
For future reference,
My Eyes! The goggles do nothing!
I stole this Sig
no he is just looking at picture 6 and assumes he can see into the future. was still workign for me by the way, slow but would have only taken 10min to load if i had not decided to use a mirror.
Rainier Wolfcastle (As he is hit by a tidal wave of acid) : "My eyes...the goggles do nothing!"
Episode: Radioactive Man (Season 7)
Rapidly approaching the Zener knee...
The title is a classic Simpsons reference. Rainer Wolfcastle stars in a movie as radioactive man where Milhouse has to save him. As acid comes directly at him, the imitation Schwartzenegger screams, "My eyes...the goggles do nothing!" http://www.fact-index.com/m/mc/mcbain__the_simpson s_.html
The laboratory of Dale Purves at the Duke University Medical Center is also researching visual illusions. Check out www.purveslab.net for interactive animations (yes, it's a Flash site).
He's also written a book entitled Why We See What We Do: An Empirical Theory of Vision.
This is a tech site. Most /. stories are about a new chip some company launched or what have you. This usually doesn't happen on Sunday.
I read that as the submitter knew that the web page was not time sensitive (i.e. it will be as interesting to see for the first time next week as it is to see for the first time today).
Therefore, it is a good one for the editors to hold in reserve, for when there are few topical stories, rather than have either few stories or some naff ones.
It appears that the editors chose not to follow the advice, (as is thier want)
"Pardon me, but isn't news something that isn't known yet?"
Umm, no, news is something that is currently happening or has already happened. Something that isn't known yet is the future, not news.
Meh.
I've never seen anything like that before. Most optical illusions involve misjudging sizes or perspective due to relative proximity to confusing cues, or flipping back and forth between two difference scenes with ambiguous figure/ground. But I've never seen one that makes static things look like they're moving. Anyone have any info on the science behind these? What makes that happen?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"The page is on a .jp uni server so they SHOULD be able to handle the herd of rhinos that is ./."
Yes, but little did you know that the herd of slashdotters you redirected would lead to the undersea cables vibrating at a harmonic frequency which would then attenuate the tiny earthquake starting on a loadbearing undersea mountain chain, but I found it in the Google cache! Isn't technology wonderful?
He submitted it a while ago for the Slashdot editors to hold onto and post when a slow news day (like today) comes around.
The editors probably should've removed the first few words from the article summary, but oh well...
This space intentionally left blank.
Open format, multiple open-source implementations, good featureset, good file size when used correctly, wide adoption, convenience- it may not be perfect, but what's so icky about it?
I was looking at the image on a cache, so didn't see the PDF link.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Archive.org to the rescue!
http://web.archive.org/web/20031203215948/www.psy. ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/download.html/
This will probably get slashdotted really quick because the archive.org servers are already slow. Someone make a mirror of this page quick so everyone can have a piece!
It's excellent for what it does, and it beats the pants off Word .doc format as a distribution format.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I had seen this before and was looking for a custom wallpaper manufacturer to have the Rotating Snakes illusion made into wallpaper for my bathroom. Just for the entertainment of having my friends to to go to the bathroom after a long night of drinking...hilarity ensues.
I'd love to see these on a t-shirt. Especially the anomalous motion ones. I wonder if there is enough detail for it to work.
It's an open standard.
Michael Bach's page has most of these illusions and more in interactive flash.
_real_ acid?
Would Michael prefer the documents to be in the more stable and portable Microsoft Word format?
The editorial comments on slashdot make less and less sense with each passing week. Maybe they discovered a new way to smoke pot at the head office?
Well, you can wait until next week. This is slashdot after all, the story will be back.
> Some of the pictures on this website can cause dizziness or might possibly epileptic seizures.
This is true, folks!
Take care!
Specially beware of the last picture, I got nausea just from looking at it!
My, it was horrible!
that would be a japanese university server. you must be american.
And you, sir, must have no 'shift' key.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
ach mein eyes! too bad there isn't a handy cyber-gates borg eye-patch to fix all that...
Just use this. Just saw it on Wired. They mirror every website Slashdot news includes.
Or not...as of 8:30 eastern it's been slashdotted.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
... maybe you should see things moving a bit
and so much colours!
boring day, boring day
We prefer the term "crash" to refer to a gathering of us... herds are so... blaise.
Congregations of other animals have different terms...
A murder of crows
A gaggle of geese
A pounce of cats
An ambush of tigers
More can be found here.
These optical devices could potentially be quite useful... going to have a play :-).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"Oh sweet you can set 'em as your wall paper....Oh Shit!!!"
*Vomit"
http://www.commaecho.com
So, just exactly who IS "./" ?
i mean, come on, a university server in japan, slashdotted? how unlikely is that?
... should use PNG instead of GIF. First, as we all know, PNG aren't animated, so no-one will be fooled into thinking that maybe these are animated gifs ;-)
But jesting aside; 310097 rotsnake.gif vs 262253 rotsnake.png, 46.7KB saved for that single image, or about ten seconds download time for a modem user.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
incase the submitter didn't know,
jap universities have some of the most horrible connectivity ever.
incidentally, the server is now unreachable.
thanks for fucking it up for everyone!
you might have confused them with u.s. universities which actually have bandwidth.
what web-page? that was all an optical illusion
Chairs are for sitting, PDF is for printing
I completely agree with that, but decided to click the link anyway. Read halfway down, glanced over to the side, and what do I see?
Free Chapter from "Son of Web Pages That Suck" (PDF from Sybex via ftp 3.25Mb)
Thank you kind sir, for the hearty laugh.
Speaking of Simpson's quotes, why the fsck wasn't the normal Fox line-up on tonight? Instead, I find some gay cowboy-eating-pudding movie that 98% of the free world has already seen. WTF! Fox is shit, and they've actually found a way to get worse. Did Rupert suddenly sell out to MTV?
.
Ramachandran's optical illusions
Johansson's point-light walker (Flash animation)it's an UNIversity server in .jp (JAPAN)
PDF is icky if you don't have a LaTeX distro ;)
Just for the record, the total savings are 110273 bytes for the five GIFs (~22s at 5KB/s), attempting no palette reduction.
Unfortunately he's used JPEG on a couple of the images, for some reason.
A very cool illusion is available here. Try looking inside of the triangle defined by the yellow dots, as the blue dots wander around. After a few moments, the yellow dots begin to blink in and out of your visual consciousness. It's quite a powerful effect.
Ha ha ha ha.
Outstanding. I never noticed that.
C-x C-s C-x k
PDF is bad, bad, and bad for websites, but even worse are links to MS Word doc format. They truly suck ass.
why isnt this on the slashdot frontpage?
Bah, ''Shift'' keys are overrated. Real men use caps lock to get them uppercase letters.
Sig
hand shadows
you are the one who is wrong, sir.
PDF rocks, moron.
Thank god they didn't use a Microsoft format.
the rhinos trampled it
Anyone seen my jagged little pill?
Check out this image. The squares marked "A" and "B" are the same shade of grey. If you don't believe me, open the page in a paint program and check out the colors.
I've always wondered about this. We know about those grid illusions where the intersections appear to be darker than they are, or the "rotation" illusion in the article. But can you undo the illusion? Can you offset the color and remove the "dark intersection" problem? Can you curve shapes the opposite way and undo illusions of curve?
Yes, hours upon hours of fun... and keeping idle hands from doing the devils work... for a while.
Anyone seen my jagged little pill?
Obligatory Futurama quote
>isn't known yet is the future
Hmmm, is not known yet does not necessary mean it will happen? Well no good is my English so am I who to talk?
As for news? what is news? I thought I now what reality is. Then I saw a few reality television show and now I feel I am trap in some anti-reality...I needs some news...but what is news...er...I see my future and isn't known...or is it? Got to go.
Now I have a headache.
We now return to Battling Seizure Robots!
There's already a HerdofNerds!
It's the indie slashdot for the right brained types.
That Userfriendly outscoops Slashdot!
http://userfriendly.org/lotd
pdf is icky because it is a cross-platform well defined spec that produces beautifully printed output.
And is obnoxious for reading on-screen.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
I just figured out how to make ANYBODY spill the beans. Just put terrorists in a room painted entirely in this .
If you made one of these your wallpaper? :)
Square A has an RGB value of 107,107,107 while square B has an RGB value of 109,109,109!!!
"that would be a japanese university server. you must be american."
Look! Mozira!! RUN!!!
"Derp de derp."
PDF is an open standard.
My other car is first.
"I would like to Slashdot a server that hosts a large number of images. That should spice things up."
Post a link to a porn site.
is it an open standard (ie: can changes be submitted) or just open spec (able to be re-implemented freely)
There should be a warning for migraine sufferers :-) /. 'dare', I loaded up the page and whoaa..migraine headache came back. The rotating snake thing is like...oh shit, I think I am going to barf on the keybo
I had to come in to work, just recovering from a migraine headache early this morning. Not being able to give up on a
Clearly the interpretation step is what causes this optical illusion, along with all other optical illustions. What I'd like to know is what in particular about this image makes it look moving when it's not.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'm looking at those spirals, man I'm feeling sick can't even type feel like im going to pass ouss.dak;1234l;199851q3t q3j q
314905ua;klsd....
And that is a bad thing if you're trying to read it on a computer screen rather than printing it out. .pdf is a great format for things that will end up printed, like forms, or brochures; .pdf sucks for reading on computers because it does not adapt to local screen geometry.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
rotsnakes.ai(4MB)
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
But then again, So is .ps.gz
The image "A Bulge" suffers from minor imperfections - for example, the cell farthest down initiating the illusion is black with two white squares at the top. The center of the small right-hand square has a grayscale value of 254 rather than 255. Other imperfections exist elsewhere.
While this doesn't impact the illusion directly, I know something that does. CRT monitors have been known to have minor convergence issues that generally mess around with how an image should look. As a result, it's best to print it out on paper to view the result.
Anyone seen any more of these musical illusions before?
o te /fr.discrete.html
http://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/highest_n
If you hold your hand in front of your face and wave it back and forth really quickly, so that your fingers intermittently interrupt the image, I find that it gets rid of all of the illusory movement in all of the images.
Looking at the top image and blinking my eyes really fast is *very* strange. It turns it greyscale, sorta.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Notheingis wrong with pdf as a data format. where it sucks is as a method of giving information that could just as easily been in html, pdf's have their uses if you want to make a form that someone prints fills out and signs before mailing it to you they work great. If exact printing is crucial to you then a PDF is perfect. What sucks is when I am looking for a chunk of info and I have to open yet another program to read just some text. This is the case here. Oh yeah and I hate that the stupid adobe reader checks for updates every damn time I open it.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
One of my customers had the computer sitting in the corner, so as you face the computer, you're also facing the corner.
The trouble was, the wallpaper was vertical blue and white stripes, each about 1 inch (2,5 cm) wide, covering both walls.
Sitting at the computer, seeing the striped wallpaper in your peripheral vision, you would get the unnerving feeling the monitor was attacking you, slowly approaching you, menacingly. (It didn't help that the monitor was on an elevated platform, so you actually had to look up at it.)
After a few years, they covered the wallpaper with wood paneling.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Ruku! Mojira!! RAN!!!
There is a black and white round one called "Uzumaki Anpan". Uzumaki means whirlpool, coil, eddy or vortex. Something spinning around (uzu means swirl, maki means wrap as in wrapped sushi). As for the second term, An is sweet black miso paste, and pan is a loan word from the Portuguese for bread. Anpan is a hugely popular round puffy donut with the sweet paste inside. So the title roughly means, Vortex Jelly Donut. Rudy Rucker probably has some good words for it, I'll borrow one: Yarrr!
commonchaos beat Suchetha to it, by over a year it looks like ;)
The fact that the letter A is light and the letter B is dark contributes to the illusion. Try covering them up as well - then you'll see that they're the same.
-ReK
md5sum -c reality.md5
reality: FAILED
md5sum: WARNING: 1 of 1 computed checksum did NOT match
FYI, looking with two eyes, the snakes rotated, but I didn't feel sick.
Closing one eye just to see... the snakes STILL rotated a bit, but I very quickly (almost immediately) felt powerfully sick. I'm not joking. It freaked me out. I'm not going back to that page...
So that bit about "when the brain can't handle conflicting information from your two eyes" has to be crap. And closing one eye can make things much worse.
... is WebGoggles. Not safe for work
So is HTML, it is also suited for on screen reading.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
just FYI.. when i submitted this it was
.jp uni server so they SHOULD be able to handle the herd of rhinos that is ./"
"In anticipation of a slow news day i would like to direct the Mongol Tartars at Akiyoshi Kitaoka's Optical Illusions page at http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html The page also also has explanations on why/how they occur (in icky-poo PDF format).
the page is on a
it was obviously edited for clarity and content
mosty of teh changes are good, but i wish they had left the Mongol Tartar comment in though
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
Visit also http://www.sandlotscience.com/ a google search for "optical illusions" brings up many more pages
hmm looks i'm going to be defending michael and the editors on this one..
the article text was mainly ME.. it was edited for content, and clarity, but mainly me.
i posted this for sunday just because (after being in the media for a while) i know very little happens on sundays. and so if you're going to put in something that is only marginally interesting compared to AMD launching its new 128bit chip or whatever, you have a better chance of getting it posted if you submit it for sunday.
atb
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
PDF is icky for various reasons:
On Windows: The Adobe Acrobat plugin for browsers takes forever to load plugins you're not gonna be using, and it can freeze up your browser for awhile doing so.
On Linux: The Linux OS you just installed doesn't like PDF, and you have to convert it to PS before you can do anything with it.
On Mac OS X: PDF is not icky here, but you aren't currently using a mac. Boo hoo.
Seriously? thought you get epileptic seizures from rapid bright flashing images, not slow to still moving images. How can an epileptic ride a bus?
People with photosensitive epilepsy have seizures that are triggered by flickering light. Nice trolling + Pokemon reference.
indicated it was a pdf, indicated size, probably meant for printing... What is the issue? He does exactly as he advertises
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
At first I thought the parent said "microdot to the rescue" - that would certainly explain why these images seem to move.
these-a illusion just proof one thing:
we're not who we think to be. looking at the
illusion generates a core-crash of the artificial
intelligence that is implanted in all human brains.
it proofs that WE ARE POSSESED!
just like in neuromancer a virus slowly drills its
way into the black ice of the A.I. looking at these
pictures confuses the "free-will-I-am-free"
collective entity that lives in all our minds!
if you look at the pictures and see no illusion,
then you are one of very few people who have not
been infected by the "collective-entity".
think of this "collective-entity" as a Virtual
machine running onthe brainw wet-ware and our
personality and concience running in untop of it.
we THINK we are in control, but we are just
emulated personalities
If you like this stuff, and especially if you like it explained, be sure to pick up a copy of Visual Intelligence by Donald Hoffman. By far the most interesting scientific prose I've read in years.
A grouping of rhino is not a herd.
Right, cross your eyes while keeping them focussed on the pictures. Some of them can be viewed stereoscopically. Bleh, yak! (passes out)
While the title may be -1, Offtopic (or +5, Funny, depending on your current state of mind), the optical illusions are very cool. Very vertigo-inducing, however.
Never start vast projects with half-vast ideas.
That said, any brain stimulus that involves coordinating the hemispheres could trigger a seizure if it's in the damaged area. And at that, last I looked at current research, they're saying that the right hemisphere controls the left field of vision on both sides and vice versa for the right, entirely contrary to the earlier theory that the each hemisphere of the brain controlled one eye. *wry grin* Where it gets really weird was that it was proven in experiments that each hemisphere handled the input from one eye and now they've proven it the other way. It really makes you wonder how much of our brain's deelopment may rely on how we believe it should work.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
The correct line is: "The goggles do nothing!"
"The goggles- they do nothing" - Rainer Wolfcastle, as Radioactive Man, while filming a stunt involving acid and is only given a pair of safety goggles, from an episode of The Simpsons
Actually postscript is encumbered, with patents I think.
My other car is first.
well, it basically has to do with font and resolution matching. Some PDFs look very nice on screen, not just on paper.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
Maybe I'm the odd one, but if I was reading a sample chapter from a book (as I do often on amazon), I wouldn't feel the need to print it. I'd either buy / borrow the book after reading the samples, or have no interest in it and move on to the next.
If this goes through twice, I blame Thunderbird.
I noticed that for me the illusions seem to appear very vibrantly and active. While a coworker who doesn't suffer from eyestrain doesn't see hardly any moment. interesting...
To witness what the picture is doing to your brain even more directly than cutting/pasting squares or looking at color hex values or blocking off with windows, physically use a piece of paper with small holes cut in it held against the screen.
Now arrange the holes so that one hole shows only the B square color (no edges, no letter B). Then slowly slide the other hole from showing no A square edge to the A square edge dividing the hole in half. If you do it right, it looks like the colors are actually darkening and lightening as you slide the paper and the ratio of area of A square/adjacent square changes within the hole.
Bear witness to the mechanisms of visual perception in real time! Small patches of color constitute a sizable percentage of your consciousness! This is a small peek behind the scenes of existence. You might call this picture an "optical illusion" but this picture is merely an extreme contrived example that calls attention to the kind of perceptual interpretation that your visual cortex is performing on a moment-to-moment basis.
The act of being, the act of existing for a conscious entity, it is the act of unconsciously reinterpreting our perceptions so we can make sense of them, and we usually don't get to see the first drafts.
Insert further life-is-an-illusion observations here for those of you who are more buddhistically inclined.
"Humanity lives and dies by its capabilities of communication, or lack thereof."