Why is this picture "moving"?

From a link in an IMHO fantasy thread, this link was posted to a screen shot of a flight simulator.

The grey bit of the picture appears to be in motion, is this because of the deficiency of my monitor, or an optical illusion? And if the latter, what causes it?

It isn’t moving for me. I wonder if it’s your monitor. Either that or one of us has bung eyes!

I see it moving. I don’t know the answer as to why, I just wanted to OP to know that others can see it too.

It’s not moving for me, but probably what’s happening is that the grey section is actually a checker of black and grey (I think), and something about your monitor is making the individual lines appear to animate.

Do you have a CRT or a flat panel monitor?

I find it emotionally moving: the greyness of the chequerboard apron, reflecting our (“the pilots’”) despair, yet it is somehow hopeful: this dull grey expanse holds the promise of a better life just over the horizon; the clever contrast between the vanishing-point perspective, and the uncompressed chequerboard - are we here, it asks, or are we really travelling away? Have we just arrived? In birth there is death; in death, rebirth, arrival/departure - or crash? A masterpiece.

Oh OK, in reality I have a flat panel monitor, and it is definitely wobbling around.

A flat panel monitor here too.

Laptop, no movement.

It’s a moire effect, because the pixels are a high contrast checkerboard pattern that don’t quite line up with your monitor resolution after having been resized.

I have a flat panel monitor and I can discern no apparent motion. I agree with Sage Rat - if an image like this - with a very fine checkerboard pattern used for shading - is displayed on a CRT monitor which uses interlaced scanning, it will appear to shimmer or move because different lines of dots are alternately being displayed and they happen to be close enough to the scan line height of the monitor to make it appear as though they’re not different lines of dots, but the same line, moved.

Dunno why it would happen on a flat panel monitor unless there’s some scaling going on (a 1024 x 768 graphics card output stretched to fit a larger resolution panel, or if the flat panel monitor is actually a TV and the signal is going through part of the transfer as an analogue signal - that can cause crawly images sometimes.

Used to happen with TV newsreaders and tweed jackets, back in the 70s.

And the most important question of all: Will the plane take off?

In a way, aren’t we all on a treadmill?

Those of you who see it moving, do you have astigmatism? I do not see it moving but sometimes my astigmatism causes me to see strange motion where there are similar patterns. When I try to read letters that are far away, for instnance, they sometimes seem to “shimmer.”

Here’s a close up

Strange, the close up in the circle in the middle seems to be moving slightly while the rest of the picture stays still.

Maybe it’s the same reason this moving picture optical illusion works.

Not moving for me.

Guys who see it moving: is your set resolution native for your monitors? Maybe that’s the reason for apparent movement?

ETA - I have astigmatism and it’s not moving for me - with glasses and without.

I’ve got a 22 inch widescreen LCD monitor and it is moving for me. My resolution is set at 1680x1050…

My answer is pretty much exactly the same as Cowboy8467’s – same size and resolution monitor, and it’s very definitely appearing to move for me.

The repetitive dot pattern interacts with saccadic eye movements.
I’m not finding a description of the precise effect online, but Wolfram has a nice description of the similar Ouchi Illusion.

Mine is 19 inch LCD with set (and native) resolution 1280x1024. Oh, and TFT matrix.

Nothing moving at all.

As a test I changed resolution, but results were ambiguous - that checkered pattern was all messed up, but still doesn’t moved a bit.