Is this optical illusion a set-up or not?

That is because it is only spinning in one direction.

Oh god, I was just about to say:

"I can only see clockwise"

But as I opened up an MSN window to my girlfriend to paste her the link, my unfocused eyes saw that she was in fact spinning counter-clockwise!

*X-Files music*

Yeah, I was distracted by some noise in the background and then I looked at her again; she changed her direction!

There's something wrong with this stuff, seriously!

if you're having trouble changing direction, look at her shadow instead

I don't see why it would be a set-up. The page explains it quite thoroughly, that it lacks visual depth clues and hence could be perceived as being seen either from the top or the bottom, which changes which leg you perceive to be which, and this in turn decides what direction she is spinning in.

Goodness that's brilliant.
Want to make her change direction?
Use your hand to cover everything except her head. Watch and wait for a few moments, or look away and back again. Her head should seem to be going in the opposite direction. Remove your hand, and the rest of her will have followed suit.

It's one of those illusions that's so simple it's amazing. I love this kind of stuff.

:edit: damn, it's hard for me to see her going anticlockwise, she keeps reverting back to clockwise unless I mentally focus extremely hard.

I couldn't resist implementing some visual aids in a side-by-side comparison just to see the effect. I painstakingly added "eyes" (freaky ones, I know) going two different ways. It's much easier to see the direction like this.

http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/5...inggirllp9.gif

Also notice how both "change direction" when you follow the eyes of one of them. :)

I can control the direction, fairly easy too. But it starts hurting my eyes after a while, so that's no fun :D

xDD before i was able to change the way she was spinning pretty easily, but it's hard now.

and also, rantzien's picture hurts my eyes whenever i focus on it. and now it's ALWAYS changing direction! D: the eyes! the eyeeeeees!

I can see them both moving in their respective directions at the same time. She moves clockwise normally for me.

If you don't look at the head, it's very easy. But when I look at the whole body, she only spins one direction. Stupid optical illusions hurt my head now :D

EDIT: Now I can't get it to work at all...

I'd start a petition: encouraging SquareEnix's developers to render optical illusions mixed with thier games' visual plots. Now, that would be a great idea. Massive mental-confusion ftw? :p

fake. im reading the article and i notice something out of the corner of my isnt the same. its the animation changing direction. she even changes her foot. its a scam

It's not a scam.

What's really messed up is using Rantzien's double picture post and seeing one of them move clockwise while the other moves counter-clockwise.

Yeah it's not a setup, the thing is in actuality only rotating one way but because it is turned into a 2 dimensional image and there is nothing telling you which side you are looking at it can appear to spin one way or another just depending on how you look at it. Look at Rantzien's pair cover one head and they both appear to spin the way the other one is, cover the other head and they appear the opposite.

I looked at the individual frames thinking I could spot a flaw that would give it away like the toes. But just when I think that the foot I'm seeing has to be a left foot, I realize that if it were a right foot and you were seeing it from the back instead of the front, it would look exactly the same. So for example look at a frame where the arms are on either side of her. Is the girl facing you or has she got her back to you? You can see her thumbs, but are the thumbs in front of her hand or behind? It is impossible to tell because either way it would look exactly the same when you make it into a silhouette like this. It really is ingenious for someone to figure this out though.

What's really funny is that our brain can't figure this out. It can't see the thing as something that isn't spinning one way or the other. It has to just pick a direction that makes sense at the time and assume that it is turning that way, and once it is, it's freaking hard for you to convince it otherwise without looking away.