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Animation basics

Taking a series of still, sequential images. Let’s look at them one by one. Faster. Now, let’s remove the gaps, go faster still. Wait for it… bam! Motion! Why is that?

Intellectually, we know we are just looking at a series of still images, but when we see them change fast enough, they produce the optical illusion of appearing as a single, persistent image that’s gradually changing form and position. This effect is the basis for all motion picture technology, from our LED screens of today to their 20th century cathode ray forbearers, from cinematic film projection to the novelty toy, even, it’s been suggested, all the way back to the Stone Age when humans began painting on cave walls.

This phenomenon of perceiving apparent motion in successive images is due to a characteristic of human perception historically referred to as “persistence of vision”. The term is attributed to the English-Swiss physicist Peter Mark Roget, who, in the early 19th century, used it to describe a particular defect of the eye that resulted in a moving object appearing to be still when it reached a certain speed.

Not long after, the term was applied to describe the opposite, the apparent motion of still images by Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau, inventor of the phenaskitocpe. He defined persistence of vision as a result of successive afterimages, which were retained and then combined in the retina, making us believe that what we were seeing is a single object in motion. This explanation was widely accepted in the decades to follow and up through the turn of the 20th century, when some began to question what was physiologically going on.

In 1912, German psychologist Max Wertheimer outlined the basic primary stages of apparent motion using simple optical illusions. These experiments led him to conclude the phenomenon was due to processes which lie behind the retina.

In 1915, Hugo Munsterberg, a German-American pioneer in applied psychology, also suggested that the apparent motion of successive images is not due to their being retained in the eye, but is superadded by the action of the mind.

In the century to follow, experiments by physiologists have pretty much confirmed their conclusions. As it related to the illusion of motion pictures, persistence of vision has less to do with vision itself that how it’s interpreted in the brain. Research has shown that different aspects of what the eye sees, like form, colour, depth and motion are transmitted to different areas of the visual cortex via different pathways from the retina. It’s the continuous interaction of various computations in the visual cortex that stich those different aspects together and culminate in the perception. Our brains are constantly working, synchronizing what we see, hear, smell and touch into meaningful experience in the moment-to-moment flow of the present.

So, in order to create the illusion of motion in successive images, we need to get the timing of our intervals close to the speed at which our brains process the present. So, how fast is the present happening according to our brains? Well, we can get an idea by measuring how fast the images need to be changing for the illusion to work. Let’s see if we can figure it out by repeating our experiment.  Here is the sequence presented at a rate of one frame per two seconds with one second of black in-between. At this rate of change with the black space separating the images, there is not real motion perceptible. As we lessen the duration of blank space, a slight change in position becomes more apparent and you star to get an inkling of sense of motion between the disparate frames. One frame per second, two frame per second, four frames per second. Now we are starting to get a feeling of motion, but it is really not very smooth. We are still aware of the fact that we are looking at separate images. Let’s speed up, eight frames per second, twelve frames per second. It looks like we are about there. At twenty-four frames per second, the motion looks even smoother. This is standard full speed. So, the point at which we lose awareness of the intervals and begin to see apparent motion seems to kick in at around eight to twelve frames per second. This is in the neighbourhood of what science has determined to be the general threshold of our awareness of seeing separate images.

Generally speaking, we being to lose that awareness at interval of around 100 milliseconds per image, which is equal to a frame rate of around ten frames per second. As the frame rate increases, we lose awareness of the intervals completely and are all the more convinced of the reality of the illusion.

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