The eyes appear to move and follow you as you walk around the room.
Are you looking for a way to make your drawings look alive? Try this activity and make an awesome creepy face whose eyes follow you as you move around the room.
By Mike McRae
The eyes appear to move and follow you as you walk around the room, but it is actually an optical illusion. Optical illusions play with the way you see and understand the world.
This optical illusion happens because the drawn eyes and face are not on the same piece of paper. The eye holes frame the pupils, but secretly, there is distance between them. Our brains interpret this as the pupils moving to follow us around the room.
We don’t think too much about seeing the world. We don’t usually notice our eyes moving and looking around and we don’t notice how our brain interprets what we see. There are, however, many interesting things happening in our eyes, in the way they move and in what happens between our eyes and our brain.
We see when light enters our eye through the pupil and passes through a lens. This lens can change shape to makes sure that the light lands on the retina at the back of our eye.
Information is sent to our brain through electrical impulses from cells in the retina. Our brain then turns these electrical impulses into information about what’s around us.
Eye movement studies have found that we only look at certain elements of a whole picture, and we keep coming back to those same elements, especially if they are unusual or different.
Scientists can measure eye movement a couple of ways. They can use a contact lens-like attachment that fits onto the eye directly, they can film the eye with a camera, or they can attach electrodes around the eye to measure eye movement.
When looking at websites, researchers have found we move our eyes in an F shape. We first scan across the top of the website and then move down a little and look across again. We then scan down the side of the page. This means if you want to be sure visitors to your webpage read some particular information, you should include it in the top paragraph. (This gets us thinking that if you are still reading this paragraph you are defying what’s normal! Good work!)
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27 September, 2023 at 3:18 am
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