This is the advanced algebra of optical illusions.
In an internet oversaturated with optical illusions, we might have found an eye-nomaly: This ocular jigsaw depicting “giant lamps” is short-circuiting people’s brains with some puzzle fans claiming they’ve been staring at it like “idiots” without any lightbulbs going off. The illusion allegedly first surfaced on Facebook Marketplace, but was reposted to Reddit, where it’s going viral.
“How big are these Facebook Marketplace lamps?!” reads the description to the ophthalmological Rubik’s cube, which appears to depict two giant lamps sitting in someone’s yard like oversized lawn ornaments.
Spoiler alert! The correct answer is revealed later on in this post.
Needless to say, this mind-melting eye exam had users fumbling about like a moth slamming into a lightbulb.
“That’s one of the most convincing illusions I’ve seen in a while,” exclaimed one stumped Redditor of the visual voodoo. “Took me long enough to figure out.”
“I’m at work staring at this like an idiot — just figured it out,” wrote another, while one frazzled puzzler quipped, “I don’t think I would have ever got it, I just accepted they were huge.”
“I still don’t see it haha,” said another.
In case you’re still stumped, the answer is that the lights are actually dangling from a wire in the foreground, but are shot at such an angle that they look colossal.
As one Redditor explained, “It’s the depth of field as well and the fact that everything seems to be in focus at once, I can’t tell if it’s deliberate, or accidental, or just some new-fangled camera phone shenanigans.”
Another said that the “slight scuffing on the bottom of the bell” helped maintain the illusion that the lamps were in the grass.
“There also seems to be a processing algorithm at work making a dark line at the edges of the lamps which reads like a shadow line on the grass,” theorized another online illusion luminary.
“I reckon if OP had cropped the top and cut out the wire from the photo I’d still be trying to work it out now!” gushed another.
This isn’t the first optical illusion to cause social media to scratch their heads. Earlier this month, the internet blew a collective gasket over some advanced eye-roglyphics that can purportedly only be solved by 1% of people.