Drifting Tiles

What is happening

This image is a completely static SVG. There is no animation whatsoever. And yet moving your eyes across it, or placing it at the edge of your screen and looking at it loosely, makes the rows of tiles stream sideways.

Pressing “Reveal the answer” leaves only the middle row. Once the repetition is gone, the drift disappears too.

Why it looks that way

Each tile is painted in a fixed order: black → mid-tone → white → a different mid-tone. This “asymmetric luminance sequence” is the key.

• Your visual system processes bright and dark regions at slightly different speeds
• That tiny lag gets interpreted as “movement” between neighbouring luminance edges
• Central vision has enough resolution to cancel the lag out, but peripheral vision cannot

That gives it a rare property: it stops when you try to look at it directly, and moves when you don’t.

What changes the effect

• When the order is reversed on every other row, neighbouring rows drift in opposite directions, producing a wave-like ripple
• The closer the mid-tones are to black or white, the weaker the effect
• Tiles that are too large get processed by central vision, and the motion disappears

First described

After Jacques Faubert / Andrew Herbert, 1999
Source: "The peripheral drift illusion: A motion illusion in the visual periphery", Perception

Akiyoshi Kitaoka's "Rotating Snakes" (2003) is the best-known work built on the same principle. No figure from that work is referenced here — only the underlying mechanism of apparent motion in peripheral vision is implemented from scratch.

See it in the timeline