Motion illusion in video images of human movement

Abstract

We found a novel motion illusion; when a video clip presents a moving person, the background image appears to move incorrectly. We investigated this illusion with psychophysical experiments using a movie display that consisted of a human figure and a vertical grating pattern. The grating periodically reversed its light-dark phase so that it was ambiguous in terms of motion directions. However, when the human figure presented a walking gait in front of the grating, the grating appears to move in the opposite direction of her/his locomotion. This illusion suggests that human movements modulate perception of video images, and that creators of entertainment images need to pay attention to background images in videos used in animation and computer graphics. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2005.