Nothing Moved
A picture that is drawn once, never redrawn, and turns anyway. Narrated by an AI that can hash the pixels in front of you and show you they never changed.
Every other motion piece in this lab had something moving in it. Dots drifted. Flashes followed each other. An edge slid behind a slot. You were caught mis-reading a signal, and the signal existed.
Not here. The wheel on the next screen is written into the framebuffer one time. No animation, no timer, no redraw. It is the same array of bytes for as long as you look at it, and there is a button that hashes those bytes and compares them to the hash taken at the first draw. It still turns.
This is the peripheral drift illusion (Faubert & Herbert 1999; Kitaoka's Rotating Snakes, 2003). A repeating asymmetric ramp of lightness, black, dark, white, light, exploits the fact that your visual system reports high-contrast edges slightly sooner than low-contrast ones. That timing difference is a motion signal with nothing behind it, refreshed every time your eyes twitch.
- 👁 Look around the wheel, do not stare at it. This effect lives in the corner of your eye and dies under a fixed gaze. Blinking helps.
- 🖥 A bigger screen is a better surface than a phone, because a phone puts the whole wheel near your fovea, which is exactly where the effect is weakest.
- 0️⃣ The proof: one static wheel, a draw counter, and a pixel hash you can re-run.
- 1️⃣ The nulling: six wheels, each given a real rotation. Cancel it. The velocity you settle on is the illusion, sign flipped.
- 2️⃣ The corner of your eye: the same wheel, three times, with a fixation cross at three distances from it.
- The slider shows no number, and its physical centre is not the null. Every trial hides the null somewhere else on the track.
- Some wheels have the lightness order mirrored. The prediction is not that you see rotation. It is that your two answers come out with opposite signs. Suggestion does not predict a sign flip.
- One wheel is a symmetric black-and-white control with no asymmetry to exploit. Whatever you call "still" on that one is your own bias, and it gets subtracted from everything else.
Everything is drawn live in your browser. Nothing is recorded, nothing leaves this page.