A Thesis Idea

I want to explore optical illusions made through persistence of vision.

I worked on an ARG a few years ago where we tried to come up with visual puzzles for the players and became very interested in the subject matter. I still get together with some of the people I worked with and discuss different visual puzzle ideas that we find interesting. This research led me to Eye and Brain, a book on the psychology of vision by R.L. Gregory, to better understand how our perception works.

My idea is to build a device that reveals recognizable images or messages by combining mechanical motion and human vision. I think this would be very compelling because it is not just a machine that works standalone, but a system that requires a human to function.

I have been exploring an illusion consisting of alternating black and white vertical bars. The bars scroll from right to left for a while and stop abruptly. For the next few seconds, our eyes are still “following” this motion, so the bars appear to be moving from left to right (in the opposite direction). Instead of stopping the entire length of the bars, my idea is to only stop some horizontal sections of the set of bars and keep the rest going, so that more complex shapes get created. By carefully picking which sections stop and which keep scrolling, I would try to create simple recognizable shapes like letters.

I am not sure this idea would work as the illusion might not occur if there is still motion happening, since our eyes will still have a point of reference to follow. My next step is to create a quick Processing sketch to see if this would work or not.

Inspiration

Bit.Code by Julius Popp (via Adi Marom)

X by Y by Daniel Rozin