Sometimes when I look at bright red on a blue background and move my eyes around the red seems to "float" and move more slowly than the blue.

It's a basic optical illusion thing, but I'm not sure f the mechanics of it.
have you tried eversing this?

Oh, this happens to me, too. Also very bright pink and yellow...I spent a lot of time during car travels as a child coloring post-its with pink highlighter pattern and watching the yellow pop out.

I have a blue shirt w/red stars and it gets a little hypnotic and weird.

Has anyone ever looked at something in the manner one looks at a Magic Eye? It sometimes results in a weird popping effect w/out pics of dinosaurs, peace signs, sailboats and other Magic Eye motifs. In church I used to stare at patterns on ladies' dresses in front of me...the patterns would flatten out and pop at the same time. I've grown into a habit of doing this when staring at my window's blinds when I first wake up. Flat, popping blinds. I eel I am the only one who does this.

Also, I find it very funny that people use "proof" of Orgone energy, saying you can see it as the floaty transparent squiggles one sees when staring at the sky or a field of grain on a hot day. Oh, mister Orgone, way to take advantage of visual phenomena people think is unique to themselves because no-one ever discusses them.

Abbot: I totally do that all the time, in part because when I was very young I figured out how to cross my eyes at will. Chain link fences are the shit. The downside is that when I'm tired and/or presented with a situation where almost all of my field of vision is taken up by one of these patterns, I do it involuntarily and get totally pissed off at my eyes.

Curt1s: In one of my freshman classes I learned the reason for that, but I forget the specifics. Cones (which discern color) and rods (which discern luminosity) in the eye are involved, I know that much.

Repetitive wallpaper patterns can get quite trippy if you gaze at them out-of-focus.

The best optical weirdnesses are the half-rainbows you see on the edges of light/dark contrasts, eg the border of a computer screen or windowpane. On a rectangular border, two of them are generally red-orange-yellow whilst the other two kinda go blue-violet. Whatever they are, they're AWESOME.

curt1s – read up on afterimage? likely your rods + cones have acclimated differently to an overbearing visual environment. kinda like certain color-receptors are suffering temporary micro-fatigue affecting a certain tonal range only.

From wikipedia:

However if the color image is large enough that the small movements are not enough to change the color under one area of the retina, those cones will eventually tire and stop responding. The rod cells can also be affected by this.

IIRC it's because the human eye/brain can't process red and blue simultaneously. constant shifting between perceiving the red and the blue creates the floating illusion.

http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/rotrays.gif

Has anyone ever looked at something in the manner one looks at a Magic Eye? It sometimes results in a weird popping effect w/out pics of dinosaurs, peace signs, sailboats and other Magic Eye motifs.

Yeah I totally learned how to do this as a little kid when I was looking at a checkerboard tablecloth at Captain D's

It could be afterimage, remy, but this happens even after just a cursory glance at something red & blue, so I dunno if the cones are really tiring out.

okay, so what about those half-rainbows around perimeters?

I do that too, Abbott, except my eyes don't quite line up on distant things and I worry about my eyesight getting worse, so I try to stop it for fear one day I won't be able to get my focus back to normal.

I see huge patterns (unusually huge, I suspect) around lights in the dark. It is kind of beautiful and kind of annoying. I couldn't sleep one night in a hotel room because I was looking at the TV power LED in the mirror wondering if there was some way of taking my eye prescription and computer-simulating the pattern I saw. The same-colour halos I understand, but does anyone else see little blue/purple squiggles around red LEDs in the dark?

Also, I just wanted to say "scotomata" somewhere in this post because I only recently learnt the word.

scrotumata

After staring at a professor's stationery head for so long, they get kind of a small dark after-image surrounding said head. I believe it is where the idea of auras originated. From podium-protected lecture-only profs who make folks unfocus their eyes.

actually – another weird phenomenon – have you ever tried to 'see' a magic eye image when you're already 'in' the image? and doubled the perceived depth of the image (but wrecked the effect?)? as a kid i used to try to cross my eyes when looking at the wall. it would pop back, visually, about 1/2 inch into the wall. then i would 'double-cross' and the illusory 1/2 inch would become an illusory 2 inches. sometimes, i could do this 3 or 4 times and make the wall appear to move as much as 8 inches away.

After staring at a professor's stationery head for so long, they get kind of a small dark after-image surrounding said head. I believe it is where the idea of auras originated. From podium-protected lecture-only profs who make folks unfocus their eyes.

this happens to me a lot when i'm doing interviews. i become unable to focus on the subject, unable to concentrate without all sorts of wavy depth/light perception phenomena. this, in turn, leads to significant and scary moments of depersonalization / derealization.

in such situations, where my depth/spatial perception fizzles away, i've gotta use contextual clues (shadows, innate knowledge of my arms' length, a car's speed, etc., to avoid getting in accidents or going nuts. basically my 'natural' vision-processing abilities flub out, bifocal parallax fails (a lot of migraine sufferers experience this) and the world goes 2-D . things don't seem real... my interface with any local environment works like i'm controlling a video-game character: it's intentional, willful, minorly imprecise, a step removed, and always at a lag as i process and interpret the clues around me for information about my movement. time dilation effects are part-and-parcel with this experience: perceived time is much greater than actual time. clinically, neurologically, it's depersonalization, but it almost always proceeds from a visual stimulus. frequently it's an abrupt change in focus, a contraction of the visual field (looking from the horizon to a cell phone screen, eg.), uncorrected fluorescent lighting changing phase, or too much concentration on a stationary object. art galleries are killer.

(actually i had to stop typing that post and submit it b/c the screen was seeming flashy and f-ed up, under fluorescents, honest to god… this is a problem with writing quickly; or at an LCD: i have to do a lot of it with my eyes closed, or through sunglasses)

Ive had that 2d surrealness happen to me when I was stoned a few times.

floaty transparent squiggles one sees when staring at the sky or a field of grain on a hot day

Is there an actual word for this phenomenon?

I believe they're called "floaters", unpleasant as that is.

Hmm, looked it up...and that's apparently not what I'm thinking of at all.

The following is an email I sent to a friend - my depth perception is the sucky. Ms. Macmaster wasn't the greatest, so leaving was a good option.


"I bought tickets to see Natalie Macmaster for me and the big guy, and indeed we went to the show! On Wed.
Have i ever told you that I am terrified of heights and get extreme panic/vertigo when I am "too high"?
Um, so, i bought the tickets and the cute gay guy was happily flirting with the addled fag hag (me) and he said "Here are your tickets! Hope nobody is afraid of heights!"
I remember him saying that, and i remember thinking: "Tickets. Purchase. Class. I have achieved so much today."
So, we went to the show.
I am still terrified just talking about it. I was thousands of feet above the stage.Oh my. Oh no. A full on panic attack occured.
Also, I went to a meeting for my counselor/advocacy rape/ crisis intervention work - and left my usually sober partner at the doorway of the "Graduate Lounge", where he drank several more beers.
So he was not all that supportive about my panic.
In fact, he was giggling.
it is funny, in retrospect, but I really could not manage to look up or down. it's an eye-brain thing. I have bad depth perception, and My brain does not get an OK! message when my eyes see a huge, vast area without parameters.
That's vertigo! The sensation is worse. Your stomach is in your shoes.
I made it through most of the concert, but insisted we leave before the last song. Because I had already worked out how I could crawl to the exit, and how much i didn't need to care about anyone else in the section thinking it was weird to have someone crawling by their feet.

I walked out. And ran down the stairs and out into the night, and promised myself that I would be more alert when buying tickets, next time.

People who are not afraid of heights really don't understand. The vertigo part is just...awful.
I feel sick and dizzy just thinking about it."

I am supposed to wear glasses when I drive, but I don't. I just do everything with my left eye closed. The last time I went to an eye doctor he insisted I be tested for diabetes - but my sugar levels were fine. My cholesterol levels were a bit high, but that's fattiness, not vision.

maybe I look like I'm always winking at people, when really i am just trying to see!

Apparently that's not what I was thinking of, either. I thought they were the paisley-shaped things you get after staring at a lightbulb.

Whereas what I'm talking about is the weird visual phenomenon I get when I'm out and about on a bright day... There's a constant faint image that looks like an infinitely large white net being continuously pulled through a hole. Ummm. If that makes sense.

I keep trying to use my left eye - as if one day will change years of habit! - and when I hold my hand over my right (good) eye, the text starts wandering off the page! It's kind of cool.
But now I'm just giving myself a headache.
Also, if I I force myself to use my left eye, I sort of grimace, whereas my normal "one eyed closed" is very smiley.
I think I am going to bring on a seizure if I keep tryi8ng to switch eyes and type.
I am substitute teaching tomorrow. Perhaps I will do an eye experiment with the kids, just to get some data.

does anybody else have – what i affectionately, and totally unsavvily call – 'color parallax'? where one eye tends to see things in slightly cooler tones, and the other in slightly warmer tones?