In 1974, David Lee and Eric Aronson hung a room with three walls and a ceiling, but no floor, around toddlers who had learned to stand. When the walls swung, the children swayed, staggered and sometimes fell. What they saw beat what their feet felt.

Then the film tries it on you: one unbroken glide at a steady speed, eyes on the centre. In lab tests on wide screens in the dark, most people start to feel themselves moving after about 9 to 12 seconds. It's called vection: feeling that you move when only the picture does. The more of your view that moves, the stronger it gets.

A phone fills a small part of your view, in a lit room. Nobody has tested vection on a screen that small. The room, the stand-ins and the field here are our own models, built and lit in code.

So, did the field move, or did you?

Sources: Lee and Aronson, Perception & Psychophysics (1974); Riecke and Jordan, Frontiers in Psychology (2015); Palmisano and Riecke, PLOS ONE (2018); Nakamura and Shimojo, Perceptual and Motor Skills (1998); Dizmen and So, i-Perception (2023).
Music: made with ElevenLabs Music. Sounds: made by us.