Right angles are seldom found in nature.
posted by Lemkin at 2:59 PM on July 6

Eh, some rebuttal here.
posted by lalochezia at 3:08 PM on July 6 [5 favorites]

I've seen this in a couple of places now. I saw rectangles first and then circles. Not to spoil the thread here (though I think it'd be less likely on MeFi to start with), but the thing I found more interesting was how many people were going so hard on Team Rectangle that they were throwing insults, accusing anybody who saw the circles of some kind of "Emperor's New Clothes" thing and condescendingly explaining how right angles work. Like, they seemed to be getting super angry about it.

I feel like it might be presumptuous of me to suspect that says something interesting about the character of those people, but I am tempted to do so anyway.
posted by gelfin at 3:16 PM on July 6 [4 favorites]

Considering the source, such eponystery! If you catch my drift...
posted by y2karl at 3:26 PM on July 6

Took me a minute or so of trying very hard to make the rectangles turn into circles, before I realized the "circles" are between the inner parts of the "rectangles", not replacing them. After that I could convince myself to see circles composed of vertical lines surrounded by straight horizontal lines, but my brain kept wanting to revert back to rectangles.

It reminds me of the infamous dress, which to me literally appeared as light bluish-gray and brown; I assumed it was an underexposed picture of a white and gold dress, until I learned it was actually an overexposed/washed-out picture of a blue and black dress. After that I was able to mentally/visually switch back and forth between the two interpretations.

I have no personal hypotheses for either of those things.
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:27 PM on July 6 [3 favorites]

With your observation, Greg_Ace, I can see the circles! But only one at a time when I focus on its center.
posted by Rash at 3:38 PM on July 6 [1 favorite]

I see no curved lines whatsoever.

Can someone kindly screen capture the image and do a photoshop tracing any of the circles?
posted by Jane the Brown at 3:39 PM on July 6 [1 favorite]

Knowing there are supposed to be circles I immediately de-focussed (idk how to describe it) and circles popped out.
posted by unearthed at 3:44 PM on July 6 [1 favorite]

Jane the Brown: here you go.
posted by L.P. Hatecraft at 3:48 PM on July 6 [14 favorites]

Perfect, thanks L.P. Hatecraft. They are now obvious to me.
posted by Jane the Brown at 3:50 PM on July 6

Oof. I don't think i'd ever have seen it without that annotated example, and even then it took a moment to percieve them.
posted by pwnguin at 3:50 PM on July 6 [2 favorites]

L. P Hatecraft, thanks for pointing them out. I can now see them when before it was just rectangles.
posted by Art_Pot at 3:51 PM on July 6 [1 favorite]

what does it mean that i only see an endless void?
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 3:51 PM on July 6 [6 favorites]

Now that I CAN see them, I remember actually seeing this before, as a child and having no problem seeing the circles.
posted by Jane the Brown at 3:53 PM on July 6

what does it mean that i only see an endless void?

Existential angst, or ascent to a higher plane. One of those.
posted by pipeski at 3:54 PM on July 6

did you step into the sphere?
posted by clavdivs at 3:58 PM on July 6 [1 favorite]

Wonder if familiarity with certain objects (such as card catalogs) is a factor.
posted by pwnguin at 3:58 PM on July 6

If you stare at it for fourteen hours you see god. Or a god. Or a dog. Something. I forget.
posted by chasing at 4:00 PM on July 6

I had to look up the illusion on YouTube to help me see the circles, and then I had to scroll back and forth a few times across the reveal in order to actually see them. The key for me is that I was originally looking for curved lines. But the circles aren’t made of continuous curved lines. They’re an interpretation of the end points of line segments of varying lengths.

The difference in cross-cultural perception is definitely interesting. I’d love to see more research into that phenomenon.
posted by tdismukes at 4:13 PM on July 6 [1 favorite]

The first time a read the Guardian article, I couldn't see the circles at all, but a combination of focusing my eyes on something far away and looking back out of the corner of my eye made them pop. I can't maintain the circles though. As soon as I focus, it goes back to rectangles.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 4:33 PM on July 6 [1 favorite]

Wow! I can see both, and switch between them. Those are some random ass rectangles, but some extremely beautiful and orderly circles.
posted by rlk at 4:34 PM on July 6 [1 favorite]

After staring at it for 20 minutes, I saw the Yellow Sign. Thanks a lot, Science!
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:41 PM on July 6 [1 favorite]

To me these feel exactly like the 3D Magic Eye pictures. I have to trick my eyes into focusing at a different depth and when I do, the circles appear to be floating, separated by some distance from the striped background.
posted by straight at 4:41 PM on July 6 [1 favorite]

what does it mean that i only see an endless void?

Wrong tab - that's the news.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 4:55 PM on July 6 [1 favorite]

I think part of the trick is seeing the circles straight on, which you aren't if you're looking at the image on a computer screen, since it's positioned to the far right. I had actually shift my head to centre the image between my two eyes before I could see the circles.
posted by sardonyx at 5:11 PM on July 6

But the circles aren’t made of continuous curved lines.

I wonder if this isn't just a what one is used to seeing thing but also a cultural thing about what constitutes a shape. I certianly was looking for a single (or small number of segments) curved line not an interplay of positive and negative space. Once I shifted to that definition of a circle they pop out like the arrow int he FedEx logo.
posted by Mitheral at 5:21 PM on July 6 [1 favorite]

straight: I have never been able to see Magic Eye pictures and as a Gen X'er, I have made a concerted effort, drunk and sober, to make them work. Something is wrong with how I see, that I cannot make them work. Also, 3D movies give me a headache. I can "make" them be 3D, same as I could force the binocular vision eye test to "work correctly" when I had to do it in grade school, but it's an effort and my head hurts after about fifteen minutes.

Our binocular vision test thing was a red dot they called an apple projected into one eye and a picnic table projected to the other eye and you were supposed to fuse these two images (with your functional binocular vision) and tell whether the apple (red dot) was on the picnic table or not. I can see either the apple OR the picnic table or "force" the depth perception to give the blended image if that's what they want. Like, I have OPTIONS on how/what I see. I had to ask the school nurse what she wanted... the apple, the table, or the combined image. She didn't understand that this was... options. I got "Just tell me what you see" a couple of times until I explained more times and she gave up under the literality of my undiagnosed... spectrum behavior and said "If you can see both things at one time, do that. That's what we want you to do."

Binocular vision isn't my first choice. Both eyes work and I look out of both of them every day, but it takes ... extra effort to make the depth perception functional and I normally don't bother unless I need it for something. But, happily, I can see circles or rectangles. Definitely defaults to rectangles, though, and that's what I see first.
posted by which_chick at 5:28 PM on July 6

I had to look at the central X in this video for a good 2 minutes to begin to see hints of the circles around the edges of the image. And then they were very tricky to hang on to. Whew. Much harder than Magic Eye.
posted by EvaDestruction at 5:34 PM on July 6

I saw rectangles, then when trying to figure out how there could POSSIBLY be circles, and thinking, "maybe they're just being loose with the definition of circular", they just popped out on their own. Neato!

I think trying to think of the horizontal lines as being a horizon, or planes on which the circles sit, kind of like two opposing bevels, helps the circles appear.

But also, rather than the carpentered world thing, maybe some folks are more used to staring out over the horizon than others. Especially if you're in a city where your unobstructed views of the horizon are rare.
posted by fnerg at 5:35 PM on July 6

Vision neuroscientist here. I studied visual area 2 (V2) for many years. That area is responsible for our perception of figure and ground, and the coffer illusion is a great example of that processing. The perception of the circles is based on processing what are called "illusory contours", that is, a border that does not consist of a traditional line. We used illusory contours to study how neurons in V2 could switch their signal even in the absence of a traditional line when the foreground and background swap, like, for example, when your perception swaps between the rectangles in front to the circles in front. When you perceive the circles, the lines of the rectangles would be processed as continuing behind the foreground circles, whose edges aren't defined by traditional contours.

Not sure if I'm explaining this well, but the point is there is a well understood brain mechanism for this and the low prevalence of perceiving the circles in the foreground is explained because they are defined by illusory contours which our brains are not optimized for. Attention has a strong effect on the assignment of figure and ground, and there may be a pariedolia-like effect among the Himba people to prioritize attending to circular shapes, allowing them to overcome the base processing which seems to preferentially respond to defined contours.
posted by Illusory contour at 5:41 PM on July 6 [3 favorites]

Tilting a phone screen helps significantly
posted by Previous username Jacen at 5:42 PM on July 6

The perception of the circles is based on processing what are called "illusory contours"

E P O N Y S T E R I C A L
posted by lalochezia at 5:42 PM on July 6 [1 favorite]

Illusory contour, a line you can trust!
posted by SaltySalticid at 5:47 PM on July 6

You are not currently logged in. Log in or create a new account to post comments.