No, I don’t know how to make it a hyperlink so you’ll have to cut and paste.
http://www.passthison.com/eyetest/?exit=no#test
I’m interested to find out how this type of visual effect works because haven’t been able to work it out.
Just read the white letters between the black blocks. There’s really nothing to figure out.
Yeah but the letters are just sort of semi random shapes when you’re looking at it on the monitor from normal reading distance. That is until you either squint or step back a few feet, I was wondering why this happens, any ideas?
We are conditioned to look for patterns. Or maybe it’s instictive. In any case, we recognize the “blocks” as three-dimensional objects and disregard the “background”. When we move farther away, the “blocks” lose their dimensionality and we see the spaces as letters.
Well, it certainly explains why I need glasses.
Actually, you don’t even need to squint or step back. Put the edge of a piece of paper at the top and bottom of a set of blocks and the words are instantly readable. Once your eyes see the fully enclosed shape within the blocks there is no “illusion” any more. I suppose Johnny L.A. explained it best. We are not accustomed to seeing our letters represented this way.
Aussie Daniel,
It seems to me that you are asking a question about not HOW to make the image come into focus, but rather a question about WHY they seem to come into focus only after a time.
Flips open his introductory psychology textbook and cross-references with his perception and sensation textbook
Ah yes, here it is. It seems as though you’re not the first to wonder about such a problem. Some of the earliest psychologists interested in the way that people perceive things were interested in just such a question. They were the Gestalt psychologists, and were concerned with things such as perception of motion, continuity of form and shape, etc. etc.
The problem at hand is produced because your brain has a difficult time perceiving what is the correct figure and what is the correct ground. In any sort of object recognition, your brain attempts to figure out what lines, colours, shapes, etc. constitute the figure (or the main subject under visual inspection), and what consititutes “ground” (the irrelevant information to your brain - the background).
In this particular image, the black areas are accentuated and made important to your brain, because they are drawn with depth. The artist is tricking your brain into believing that the blocks are the most important aspect of the picture. The depth serve as cues for your brain to pay attention to the blocks, and in doing so, the white areas become the ground (or background). Your brain almost always pays attention to only the figure, and as such, the hidden message is ignored. Cues such as depth and colour contrast are used regularily by your brain to accurately perceive the world around you - they are automatic and very adaptive to our perception of the world.
Once you KNOW what the message says, you can force your brain to accept the white as figure and the blocks as ground. For most people, it takes a very long time to do this, because it is highly counter-intuitive and maladaptive to normal visual perception of space. It’s like you’re unlearning in that instant how to “normally” see an object by ignoring the cues (i.e. depth) that would (in normal circumstances) point to what is the correct figure.
Gestalt psychology is cool stuff - if you’re interested, you should look up some of the other stuff that they seek to explain. I’m sure that any introductory psych textbook would have something on the subject, and a perception and sensation textbook would have a more detailed description.
Hope that helps!