Hidden Bird

From Michael’s “Visual Phenomena & Optical Illusions”

What to do & see

On the right you will see a ‘bird’ flying above a background consisting of random lines. Now press the button “Bird stop”: the bird not just stops flying, but vanishes completely!

Try it at various places – the background is so well matched to the lines comprising the bird that we have nearly perfect camouflage.

When you have stopped the bird’s flight, and it has merged into the background, you can try the button “Noise off”. This will reveal that the bird is still there – just invisible.

Comment

The camouflage is broken by correlated motion. This is very similar to the running Dalmatian (“help me 2” there).

Reference

This is a re-implementation of the beautiful Hidden Bird demo on the ‘hidden’ former IllusionWorks pages by Al Seckel. That was programmed by Akos Feher, who attributes the orginal drawing to David Regan.