Skip to content

Ad Disclosure

Moving sideline? Everyone was mystified by bizarre camera trick from Saturday’s Ohio State-Illinois game

Mark Schipper

By Mark Schipper

Published:

A shocking magic carpet trick during yesterday’s Ohio State-Illinois basketball game sent the Twitterati aflutter as they tried to figure out how a Buckeye player waiting to check in was seemingly rolled out from the bench area to the scorer’s table while sitting on his butt on the sideline.

It sounds strange, and looked stranger, but because of the low angle of a baseline camera pointing through the players on the floor toward the Buckeye sitting in front of the long video board built into the scorer’s table, an intense optical trick was played on the viewer.

As the video board, (which was framed tightly behind the athlete so the viewer could not see above it to a stationary object), started to roll horizontally through an advertisement, it looked for all the world like the player was being pulled up the sideline by some kind of magic transporter built into the playing floor.

It takes several passes through the video to understand what is happening and, even then, it is a powerful and strange optical illusion that would have sent the ancients into some kind of witch hunt or crusade against fearful magic that could destroy them all.

As it was, the sporting crowd watching the game on twitter reacted to it, often hilariously, as they fought against their primitive brains to allow rationality to win out. A few of their best reactions are compiled below.

https://twitter.com/jcbenge/status/1350662856484786177?s=20

https://twitter.com/JonAyala17/status/1350682198387662848?s=20

https://twitter.com/LuvNightingale/status/1350794927987433473?s=20

Mark Schipper

Mark Schipper is a reporter, sportswriter, and aspiring novelist living in Chicago, Illinois.