Ok so, Judge me with your opinions here...
But, I knew all this, intuitively.

I knew what was happening. I understood the persistence of vision as a given phenomenon. I can actually induce this persistence of vision on things as I look at them. Slowing down and increasing this persistence. Not a great amount, but I can do it enough to observe it. This means I can look at any normal object and move my head slowly to the side and watch the image degrade on my retina as I move my direction of vision to the side.

Now Destin, immediately saw this as a trick that fooled the mind into believing the image was a solid. But I wasn't fooled. Why wasn't I fooled? HAve I just been exposed to this before, and my mind is telling me the truth, thus negating the illusion?

I've seen similar tricks like this before, like on a wheel, to create an image, but if I concentrate I can see and immediately comprehend what is happening. I can stare long enough to break up the image and loose the illusion, and then have it come back.

I hope I'm making sense here.
So what I want to know, is, "does everyone have or not have, see or not see as I do?" I assumed we all did. So much so, that I've never had a question in my mind as to how this worked or that it was a trick.

Tell me I'm crazy, that's fine. But I'm interested in what other people are perceiving.

They ought to design the signs with persistence of vision tricks in mind so they can be read while spinning.

>> ^Mcboinkens:

Why do I not understand how this works.


"Persistence of vision is the phenomenon of the eye by which an afterimage is thought to persist for approximately one twenty-fifth of a second on the retina."

Eadweard Muybridge is considered the father of filmmaking for his first attempts at capturing this phenomenon with his Zoopraxiscope. Who says film students aren't worth something?

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Persistence of Vision, Spinning, LED' to 'Persistence of Vision, Spinning, LED, monkeylectric' - edited by kronosposeidon

In the vid above they just talked about the anatomy of the retina.

... and they kind of get it wrong, specifically because they refer to 'afterimages' when talking about persistence of vision theory, and then act as if the 'reseting period of the eye' is all rod and cone cells firing in unison at a framerate or something, and our brain is filling in the gaps of this constant full retinal reset (nothing like this happens).

'Afterimage' is caused by fatigued cells that have been overstimulated, made to release more neurotransmiter than they can replace. You stare at something red, then look at a white piece of paper (which stimulates all 3 cone cell varieties), and the red object from before appears as a green afterimage on the paper because the cones in the red wavelength are tired. This castle post was an 'afterimage' demo - http://www.videosift.com/story.php?id=3783

Persistence of vision is very complicated; depends on amounts of spatial displacement between frames, amount of time between frames, amount of stuff in the frame,... its weird. The brain sees this and decides whether it sees motion or whether it sees jerkiness. Talking about the brain skipping over black spaces when watching a movie projection is strange; its not like we have photoreceptors for black, so theres just nothing to see...

I'm glad this group employs some talented drumline guys. It sucks they don't employ any neuroscientists, though ; )

That's a fine example of using simple technology and persistence of vision to create a display.