Cited on HN 4 times, 2025–2026, never outright recommendedscore 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN people cite it as the origin of the vanishing-in-a-screenshot effect, used in ideas for captchas and AI-resistant text.
A game-dev video demonstrating a noise shader in Godot where shapes are visible only in motion against animated noise and vanish when the game is paused or screenshotted. The demo is available on GitHub.
“I first saw this effect in a video from Branta Games.” (HN, 2025)
For no js solution, I think some sort of using optical illusion as captcha could works, especially [link] or something like [this video] which could cleverly hide captcha answer within animated noise mess. However these methods are not really accessibility-friendly tho.
Hides shapes in animated noise, an idea for no-JS captcha.
I first saw this effect in a video from Branta Games. [this video] The effect is disrupted by introducing rendering artifacts, by watching the video in 144p or in this case by zooming out. I'd love to know the name of this effect, so I can read more about the fMRI studies that make use of it. What I've found so far: Random Dot Kinematogram Perceptual Organization from Motion (video of Flounder camouflage) [link]
Origin of the effect where content vanishes when paused.
Related work (all involve noise and flickering images, photosensitive eyes/brains beware): - "This game disappears if you pause it": [this video] - "Illusion: If You Pause, The Image Will Disappear": [link]
Related work using noise and flicker to hide content.
There was a pretty popular video showing this exact concept (hiding shapes/text in high frequency noise ) about a year ago, for those interested: [this video]
Popular video hiding shapes in high frequency noise.
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