Rotating Snakes Illusion

The rotating snakes illusion is a static, brightly colored image, created by Japanese psychologist Akiyoshi Kitaoka in 2003, that appears to rotate or drift even though nothing in the picture is actually moving. It belongs to a broader class of peripheral drift illusions, in which repeating asymmetric patterns of light and dark produce an impression of motion that is strongest in peripheral vision and fades when a single part of the image is stared at directly. The apparent motion is thought to arise from small involuntary eye movements, including microsaccades, combined with slight timing differences in how the visual system processes light and dark edges.