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Comment by pwinnski | Hacker News Reader

Having seen the rotating snakes illusion before, I decided to stare at it, playing with the focus of my eyes until the illusion of motion stopped.

Once it did, I found that many of the other illusions also didn't work. Also, I have a headache, and everything not on my screen seems slightly unfocused.

Clearly I tried a bit too hard!

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Frustrated by trompe oeils, defiant HN nerd uses concentration and focus tricks to hack his biological GPU to dump raw eye input. Optical illusions disappear. But to his horror, the rest of the world actually naturally blurry. Moral of the story: don't hack on production.

Frustrated by trompe l'oeils, a defiant Hackernews uses concentration and focus tricks to hack his biological GPU to dump raw eye input while waiting for his Idris proof of the commutativity of addition to finish compiling. Optical illusions disappear. But to his horror, the rest of the world is actually naturally blurry. Another Hackernews shows up to satirise said idiot's "experience", as massing clouds of Strikeforces of all sorts loom darkly in the distance, smelling neural buffer overflows.

(Honestly, though, that website is amazing. The "idiot" was purely for effect.)

I found that I could actually stop the snakes moving by staring intently at them. However, they easily started rotating again if I let my focus drift a bit. Yes, could probably induce a migraine if I kept at it for while.

Most of the images are different exploitations of the "peripheral illusory movement" effect. Alternating bands of contrasting color--high, medium high, low, medium low--gives the impression of movement, bit only in periphery vision.

On one hand I also felt challenged to find a way to make it stop, but on the other hand, i also had a feeling that if i win i would end up with a migraine.

thanks for reaffirming that it is possible and sparing me a headache.

It's just an eye strain headache. It goes away with rest. Migraines are a different thing.

If anyone wants eyestrain, try this:

http://www.lutanho.net/play/magiceyetetris.html

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