Optical illusion 2
Here is an interesting illusion. The image above is static, but it appears to move. For me, it works better if I move my eyes around the image.
This stationary image appears to wave without effort. The elemental illusion is our revised version of the peripheral drift illusion, in which the direction of illusory motion is black-to-dark-gray and white-to-light-gray (Kitaoka and Ashida, 2003). In this image, blue and yellow correspond to dark gray and light gray, respectively.
Not much of an explanation. I note that the letters all have black and white shading, and that the shading varies from letter to letter and from group to group. The motion seems to come from the cues in the shading. I have no idea what ECVP means, or if other letters might work too. If it works with numbers, I could generate some really irritating sudokus.
I also note that this illusion survives resizing. I reduced the image a bit to fit in the blog, and the illusion still works.