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CSS Optical Illusions

224 points16 daysalvaromontoro.com
myfonj16 days 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)

hinkley15 days 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.

smusamashah15 days 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

flexagoon14 days 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

mediumsmart14 days 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.

sandpaper2616 days 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.

brandon_bot15 days 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/

nilslindemann16 days ago

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

andredurao15 days 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 :#

aj715 days ago

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

encom16 days ago

These are all super dark, for some reason.

christophilus16 days ago

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

encom16 days ago

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

d-us-vb16 days 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.

zamadatix16 days ago

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

moralestapia16 days ago

Wow, this is great!

I want to put some of them in my UIs.

herpdyderp16 days ago

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

layer815 days ago

Heh, I used to do these in Excel.

eulgro15 days ago

They could make capchas out of these.

hiccuphippo15 days ago

"Please select the dancers spinning to the right"