History
The illusion was created by Jeremy Hinton some time before 2005. He stumbled across the configuration while devising stimuli for visual motion experiments. In one version of a program to move a disc around a central point, he mistakenly neglected to erase the preceding disc, which created the appearance of a moving gap. On noticing the moving green-disc afterimage, he adjusted foreground and background colours, number of discs, and timing to optimise the effect.
In 2005 Hinton blurred the discs, allowing them to disappear when a viewer looks steadily at the central cross. Hinton entered the illusion in the ECVP Visual Illusion Contest, but was disqualified for not being registered for that year's conference. Hinton approached Michael Bach, who placed an animated GIF of the illusion on his web page of illusions, naming it the "Lilac Chaser", and later presenting a configurable Java version. The illusion became popular on the Internet in 2005.
Read more about this topic: Lilac Chaser
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