The feathers, leaves, and flowers you see in the frame in the video below look like they’re moving in slow motion, but they’re actually moving rather quickly. The optical illusion is possible, thanks to the limits of human perception, electromagnetic vibration, and ingenious lighting.
The frame’s designer, Jeff Lieberman, a specialist in this kind of visual trickery, said:
It’s a very startling thing when you see something that’s physically in front of you but doesn’t align with your mental model of reality.
Lieberman is a scientist and engineer who co-hosted the Discovery show Time Warp with high-speed digital photographer Matt Kearney. There were two seasons with 34 episodes in all where the pair captured events (like explosions, gunshots, and ballet dancers) and witnessed them in slow motion to uncover physics principles. He also has a design firm called Plebian Design, where his team builds room-sized installations that bewilder a viewer’s sense of perception.
Most recently, Lieberman created the frame – an art installation he calls The Slow Dance. It was initially made as a gift for his friends, but the idea took off, so he made a Kickstarter and ended up delivering over 2,500 units. Now it’s for sale on his Wonder Machines website.
The Slow Dance is designed to be hung on a wall or placed on a table and admired for its ability to stretch time magically. A variety of things can be placed in the frame, and they will flutter in an invisible breeze at a hypnotically slow speed. A couple of other modes include: glitch-mode lets the item flicker and jump in space and time, and clone-mode lets you create two instances of the same object.
The secret behind the illusion is a precisely engineered system of motion and light. There are strobe lights hidden in the edges of the frame that flicker at a frequency between 79 and 81 blinks per second – too fast for your eyes to register, so all you see is the light on. Simultaneously, the electromagnetic motor in the base of the frame vibrates the object at a frequency of 80 Hz.
The flickering light illuminates the vibrating object at spaced-out moments along its path of movement. Each point is like a snapshot in time. They happen so quickly that your brain blends them, and you see the object moving in slow motion – like a flipbook.
Lieberman wants to use technology to evolve and shift human consciousness. That’s why The Slow Dance combines art, technology, and science, to remind us of the natural wonder, mystery, and beauty that surround us every day. The piece will change how you see simple objects forever.
