I was scrolling through X and came across this beach photo, it stopped me in my tracks which rarely happens these days because it's mostly doom scrolling and hate posts on politics so I just keep scrolling till I find a meme. When I first saw it, something looked off. The lady looked like she was suspended in the air. I thought it was photoshopped but looking closely I realized she was actually kneeling on the beach sand.
The way to easily tell is to crop out the black cloth lying next to her. A very good and messed up optical illusion.
It took me a couple of minutes to make sense of it. You could tell the sand and the skin tones are blending, and the poses is not helping it look natural at all, lol. My eyes wanted to fix it so badly and just call it Photoshop, could have said AI but it looks to real to say that.
So why did an illusion happen with this picture?
My best guess after looking at it for about 2 minutes is my brain got confused because the person’s legs are buried in the beach sand which is almost the same color as her skin. Her kneeling pose and the camera angle which will flatten depth all added up to create that illusion. So the visual boundaries are weak and technically there's missing information, that's why my brain tried to fill in the gaps and she looked like a monk with superpowers suspended in the air.
It was like the few times I would look at one of those old mall floor patterns, with wave tiles. My friend was about to talk my ear off over how terrible her job is, and all I could think of while this conversation took place in the chorus of dogs barking that lived nearby, was don't fall down because it very much felt like your issue upward from the ground floor. She noticed. She was annoyed, fair enough.
Once, I mistook a shadow in my apartment for a cat. I stood there for a while waiting for it to move. It is a little funny to me when I remember because I wasted 5 minutes of my life looking at nothing but a shadow.
Anyway, this beach illusion is probably random, which makes it even cooler. No tricks, I doubt she intended to pull that off. It was probably after they took the picture that they realized it. It's lighting, texture and a brain at overconfidence level. We like to think our brains are not just advanced but actually different but it's no different from autonomous vehicles facing a wheat and chaff problem. They're efficient, yes but programmed to assume first.
Not quite sure where I am going with this. Or, maybe it's just kinda weird that we so totally trust what our eyes are telling us until, you know, we don't.
