ChangeBlindness is a small game that demonstrates the change blindness phenomenon. The effect shows that our brains have a low-level (i.e. subconscious) change detection capability that can be disabled pretty easily (for instance, with a flicker of around 100ms). The game illustrates this using an increasing number of icons, one of which will change during a flicker. The goal of the game is to find the changing icon as quickly as possible.
The game starts with just one icon, but increases this number eachtime you correctly click where the change occured. Already with 5 or 6 icons visible you will realize that you can only keep track consciously of a small area that is directly in your focus. To play the game without the flicker, press the key 'f'.
Christopher Oezbek
Herderstr. 10
12163 Berlin
Germany
If you find bugs, want to send patches, improvement or make suggestions you can email me at changeBlind@oezi.de.
This page is http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/~oezbek/changeblindness/ (for offline-reference) and is hosted at Free University Berlin, where I am currently doing my PhD in CS.
Windows users can use the Installer to install the application: ChangeBlindnessSetup.exe
The application will require Java 1.5 to run.
Linux, Mac and friends will have to start using the command-line (given a Java Runtime >=1.5): changeBlindness.jar
java -jar changeBlindness.jar
Source-code is provided in a Zip-File with Eclipse-project and ant-Buildfile: changeBlindnessSrc.zip