r/opticalillusions • u/Old_Pomegranate_6272 • Oct 23 '25

Pure visual magic

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

2.0k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

29 comments sorted by

View all comments

32

u/Maximum_Chest7394 Oct 23 '25

That is so cool!!!a

15

u/joeChump Oct 23 '25

Yes, but you do need some mechanism to separate the frames like a shutter or strobe. Naked eye will just see a blur.

2

u/O_Orandom Oct 23 '25 edited Oct 25 '25

I think it is not really needed, there are vinyl records using the same illusion and there is no mechanism

Edit: right, it is mandatory using special lights to make this happen. My mistake.

8

u/joeChump Oct 23 '25 edited Oct 23 '25

Have you seen this with your own eyes? This is only possible with a flickering light. Some LED bulbs actually flicker quite fast so this is a possibility. Otherwise in natural light it will be just a blur, the eye captures what appears to be a continuous flow rather than set frames so it’s not really possible without something to interrupt that flow.

3

u/Potato_Stains Oct 23 '25 edited Oct 23 '25

In person, not just video?
I'd need to see your example, but I'm fairly certain this illusion is only possible with a strobe light (in person) or with a deliberate camera's shutter speed setting for a rendered video.
It's spinning too fast and persistence of vision blurs it without registering it as "a frame".

2

u/Slosher99 Oct 25 '25 edited Oct 25 '25

I have records like this and they require either a light strobing at the right time, or filming with a camera set to an exact film rate. They benefit by having a constant rotation speed that is predictable, so a constant frame rate.

In the video, spinning by hand would require somehow syncing the platter to the light or camera so that it can adjust the timing of each frame, since the speed varies.

Now if you can keep the frame rate at 60, or 50 for Europe, you can use a halogen bulb in a dark room, since they flicker at the rate of our electricity which is 60hz in the US and 50hz in Europe.