The optical illusion so baffling… one viewer went to see an OPTICIAN
- A Reddit user claims to have his vision impacted by a funky optical illusion
- READ MORE: How many blocks do you see in this baffling optical illusion?
One Reddit user was so baffled by an optical illusion that they booked an appointment with an optician.
The image, posted on Reddit, shows grey bricks intersected with green lines to create a grid.
It poses the simple question: ‘Are the lines curved or straight?’
While it doesn’t look like anything out of the ordinary at first sight, upon deeper inspection, things start to get rather confusing.
The image, that was posted on Reddit shows grey bricks met with green lines that intersect to create a grid (credit: Lesha Porche)
After looking closer, you’ll notice that a few of the lines curve before they look straight again.
If you keep looking, the grid almost looks like it’s emulating train tracks, the green grid starts to alternate between straight and curved lines.
The illusion tested the user’s eyes so much that they asked the people of the Reddit forum if ‘anyone ever experienced anything similar?’
They were so concerned that they went on to add: ‘[Does anyone] have any possible treatments because it’s driving me crazy’.
Medical attention
The image, created by an online illustrator relies on the strategic placement of colours and shapes to trick your brain into seeing curves that aren’t technically there.
The Reddit poster, Jon Starkgaryen wrote: ‘I looked at this for a long time, crossed my eyes and focused a lot and now my vision has been awful for a year and a half.
‘I’ve been to an optician and an opthalmologist, both can’t find anything wrong.
‘My actual vision is good but it’s like I’ve got this burned in front of everything that I see.
‘Has anyone ever experienced anything similar and have any possible treatments because it’s driving me crazy’.
The Reddit poster, Jon Starkgaryen wrote: ‘I looked at this for a long time, crossed my eyes and focused a lot and now my vision has been awful for a year and a half’
How does the illusion work
One Reddit user theorised that ‘it’s the colors of the buildings that make the curves. they’re set up in just a way that one color will spread across some houses in a curved way. the others around it are different colors therefore it makes it look like a curve when you aren’t focused on it’.
READ MORE: Optical illusion promises to reveal whether you’re really a patient person – or someone who needs control… so which image do YOU see first?
An online illusion aficionado put forward his take on why the American illustrator’s simple image affected so many.
Michael Bach said: ‘The tiles contain a low-resolution brightness curve, which is masked by all the borders.
‘It can be made more apparent by applying a little blur (4–5).
‘The blur occurs automatically in our visual system, because – largely unnoticed– our visual resolution rapidly falls off from the center of gaze: at 10° eccentricity our visual acuity is 1/10th of the central one.
‘However, the periphery does not ‘feel’ blurred, does it? Its sharpness is ‘invented’ by our visual system, just as our blind spots are ‘filled in’.
Essentially, Bach’s theory suggests that your brain is tricking you into thinking that the lines in the image are curved when in reality they aren’t.
The image has since garnered plenty of fans – with dozens telling the Reddit Optical Illusion thread what they saw.
One told Reddit: ‘This is by far the best optical illusion I’ve seen on Reddit. It’s amazing how easily your mind infers stuff from your peripheral vision’.
Another user said: ‘Yeah no it just looks curvy, just look at once singular line and follow it, should be straight’.
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