The optical illusion so mind boggling… a viewer went to an OPTICIAN

One Reddit user was so baffled by an optical illusion that they made an appointment with an optician.

The image, posted to Reddit, shows gray bricks intersected with green lines to create a grid.

It asks the simple question, “Are the lines curved or straight?”

While it doesn’t seem like anything special at first glance, upon closer inspection it starts to get quite confusing.

If you look more closely, you’ll see a few lines curve before looking straight again.

If you keep looking, the grid almost looks like it’s mimicking train tracks, the green grid starts alternating between straight and curved lines.

The illusion was such a test of the user’s eyes that they asked the folks at the Reddit forum if “anyone ever experienced anything similar?”

They were so concerned that they added, “(Does anyone have any) possible treatments because it’s driving me crazy.”

Medical attention

Created by an online illustrator, the image relies on the strategic placement of colors and shapes to trick your brain into seeing curves that aren’t technically there.

On the Reddit poster, Jon Starkgaryen wrote, “I’ve been looking at this for a long time, crossing my eyes and focusing a lot, and now my vision has been terrible for a year and a half.

‘I’ve been to an optician and an ophthalmologist, both can’t find anything wrong.

“My actual vision is good, but it’s like I’ve burned this for all I see.

“Has anyone ever experienced anything similar and any possible treatments because it’s driving me crazy.”

On the Reddit poster, Jon Starkgaryen wrote, “I’ve been looking at this for a long time, crossing my eyes and focusing a lot and now my vision has been terrible for a year and a half”

How does the illusion work

One Reddit user theorized that ‘it’s the colors of the buildings that make the curves. they are arranged so that one color will spread over some houses in a curved fashion. the others around it are different colors, making it look like a curve when you’re not focused on it’.

A lover of online illusions gave his opinion on why the simple image of the American illustrator made such an impression.

Michael Bach said: ‘The tiles contain a low-resolution brightness curve, which is masked by all the edges.

“It can be made clearer by applying a little blur (4–5).

‘The blurriness arises automatically in our visual system, because – largely unnoticed – our visual resolution quickly drops away from the center of the gaze: at an eccentricity of 10°, our visual acuity is 1/10th of the central one.

‘But the periphery doesn’t ‘feel’ blurry, does it? Its sharpness is ‘invented’ by our visual system, just as our blind spots are ‘filled in’.

Essentially, Bach’s theory suggests that your brain is fooling you into thinking that the lines in the image are curved, when in reality they are not.

The image has since garnered many fans – with dozens supporting the Reddit optical illusion thread what they saw.

One of them told Reddit, “This is by far the best optical illusion I’ve seen on Reddit. It’s amazing how easily your mind deduces things from your peripheral vision.”

Another user said, “Yeah, no, it just looks curvy, just look at a single line and follow that, it must be straight.”