I’ve noticed this effect on my cooker and microwave displays (make me dizzy occasionaly) but not on CD displays-could these be of better quality/higher refresh rate?
Well, this may or may not be related, but I long ago noticed that if I trill my tongue (as in rolling my R’s to pronounce certain Spanish words) while looking at a LED display, the numbers start jumping all over the place while the rest of the clock appears to remain stationary (in other words, trilling the tongue doesn’t make everything in my vision jump – only the LED numbers).
Barry
Making a raspberry (sticking your tongue out, closing lips on it and blowing, hand in front of mouth to catch stray spit) works with TVs and monitors, too. For me, it’s a lot easier to control the frequency that way.
Once when I was playing with VHS camera, I turned on the high-speed shutter and looked at my Radio Shack LED alarm clock through the finder. I saw half of the segments slowly fade off while the other half faded on, and this repeated in reverse. The different halves were from all of the numbers, so the display was unreadable except around the midpoint of the fade. I did the same thing with my car radio, and I could see the characters turn on and off rapidly from left to right.
Borrow a bass guitar (a regular guitar will work, but the effect is more pronounced with a bass). Stand in front of your monitor and pluck the strings while looking across the neck of the bass at your monitor. You can distinctly see the vibrations of the string.
Due, of course, to the light from the monitor striking the strings at intervals. You end up seeing only the extreme top and bottom of the string’s oscillation, whereas under a constant light source you’ll just see a blur.