Poggendorff Illusion
In the image at top you see the basic effect: the two ends of a straight line
segment passing behind an obscuring rectangle appear offset when, in fact, they
are aligned. Place your mouse pointer over the image to convince you of this.
On the top is a variation where the width of the occluding rectangles can be varied
or they can be made partially transparent. I selected the starting value of the
rectangle width so that the oblique lines appeared offset by half of their distance.
This illusion was discovered in 1860 by physicist and scholar JC Poggendorff,
editor of Annalen der Physik und Chemie, after receiving a letter from astronomer
F. Zöllner. In his letter, Zöllner described an illusion he noticed
on a fabric design in which parallel lines intersected by a pattern of short diagonal
lines appear to diverge (Zöllner’s illusion). Whilst pondering this illusion,
Poggendorff noticed and described another illusion resulting from the apparent misalignment
of a diagonal line; an illusion which today bears his name.
Comments
There is a new explanation by T. Hansen based on stereoscopic vision
which I find very convincing.
Interestingly, the flag of the United Kingdom (picture on the right) is designed
with shifted oblique lines, perhaps to compensate (the bottom-left to top-right
red line) and to “over-compensate” (the other oblique red line) for this effect?
I added the green translucent overlays to bring this out (→more details).
Some sources
Poggendorff Biography
The interactive version was inspired by Alexander Bogomolny
Burmester E (1896) Beiträge zu experimentellen Bestimmung geometrisch-optischer
Täuschungen. Z Psychologie 12:355–394
Day RH & Dickenson RG (1976) The Components of the Poggendorff Illusion. Brit
J Psychology 67:537–552
Fineman M (1996) Poggendorff’s Illusion. In: The Nature of Visual Illusion.
New York: Dover, pp. 151–159, ch. 19
Gillam B (1971) A depth processing theory of the Poggendorff illusion. Perception
& Psychophys. 10:211–216
Gillam B (1980) Geometrical illusions. Sci Amer 242:102–111, Jan.
Greene E (1988) The Corner Poggendorff. Perception 17:65–70
Phillips D (2008) has some interesting
ideas and test images on the Poggendorff illusion
Created: 2003-06-22
Last update: 2013-10-04