Things have been pretty intense at work the last couple weeks, we are writing hella code (you can see I’ve begun acclimating to the west coast) and a lucky few people have begun using what we’re making! This weekend was a much needed break from programming all day, so what did I do? Code all night.

What you see here is the square circle spiral optical illusion first made popular on the internets by a Dr. Richard Wiseman. What I’ve done is implemented the illusion using d3.js, a powerful javascript library for data visualization. I took it a step further and animated it.

You can get the code for the original illusion as well as a live demo. Here is the code for the animated version and a standalone demo here. Feel free to fork and come up with your own variations. Hint: there are several variables we can play with, and a little phase shift is all it takes ;)