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During the First World War, the Marines painted their ships in a “dazzling” camouflage, also known as “Razzle Dazzle”. Unlike traditional camouflage, which helps objects to mix in their environment, the dazzling camouflage used significant geometric patterns to try to confuse the perception of the captains of German submarine of the direction and the speed of a ship, which makes it more difficult to target. But did the dazzling dazzle, or does he look ridiculous?
Researchers at the University of Aston have studied the effectiveness of dazzling camouflage on the battleships of the First World War by reanalyzing a 106 -year study. According to the new article, the involuntary “horizon effect” – when a boat seems to move along the horizon, even if it is not – was a source of deception much greater than the dazzling painting itself, exposing key surveillance in the 1919 analysis. Their results are detailed in a study Posted on March 14 in Sage journals.
In 1919, the Naval Mit Architecture and Marine Engineering Student Leo Blodgett conducted a study on dazzling camouflage for his thesis. The study consisted in painting patterns of glare on a model battleship and observing how the models affected the perception of a spectator from the direction of the ship when it is seen through a periscope. Blodgett finally concluded that the dazzling camouflage had achieved its objective.
More than a century later, however, researchers Timothy Meese and Samantha Strong expressed important concerns about Blodgett methods. More specifically, they suspected that the distorted perception of the spectators was not completely due to dazzling painting.
“It is necessary to have a control condition to draw firm conclusions, and the Blodgett report on your own control was too vague to be useful,” said Strong, lecturer in optometry, in a university statement. “We have directed our own version of the experience using photographs of its thesis and compared the results through the Dazzle camouflage versions and versions with the edited camouflage. Our experience worked well.
The horizon effect dictates that viewers will perceive ships as traveling along the horizon even if they travel to an angle up to 25 degrees compared to the horizon. More broadly, viewers underestimate this angle, even when it is greater than 25 degrees.
If the dazzling camouflage alone was responsible for the visual deception noted in the study of Blodgett, viewers should have constantly seen the front of the ship, called the arc, “torsion” far from the travel management, according to the researchers. Meese and Strong, however, pointed out that in some cases – in particular, when the model boat moved away from the spectator – the spectator saw the arc “twisting” towards them. This indicates that another factor, beyond the camouflage of glare, influenced the illusion.
They identified the effect of the horizon and concluded that he had played a greater role in the deception of viewers than dazzling camouflage.
Researchers “already knew the Twist and Horizon effects” of a precedent study That Meese, professor of science of vision, co-written in 2024. However, “the remarkable conclusion here is that these same two effects, in similar proportions, are clearly obvious among the participants (from the 1919 study) familiar with the art of disappointment of camouflage, including a lieutenant in a European navy,” said Meese. “This adds considerable credibility to our previous conclusions by showing that the effect of the horizon – which has nothing to do with dazzling – was not overcome by the best placed to know better.”
In other words, the Horizon effect even made its own individuals. At the time, however, “the effect of the horizon was not identified at all,” added Meese, so the effect was really “deceiving the misleading”.
