Featured Image Credit: Instagram/@wheatpraylove
Topics: Instagram, Social Media
Gerrard Kaonga
A bride-to-be's trippy photo of herself in a wedding dress has terrified the internet - but people think they've figured out what's actually going on. And no, the answer isn't that we're all living in a computer simulation.
Comedian and writer Tessa Coates shared the image on her Instagram page and encouraged users to question whether she had 'found a glitch in the matrix'.
You can listen to her explain what happened below:
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The picture - spookily taken two days after Halloween - appears completely fine at first glance, but once you realize what is wrong with it becomes quite unnerving. So unnerving that some users likened it to creepy scenes regularly scene in the sci-fi thriller show Black Mirror.
Coates didn't notice what was wrong with the photo at first and got the shock of her life when she did.
Speaking on her Instagram story, she said: "I had a full-on panic attack in the street, like hands and knees in the middle of Borough Market just like dry heaving."
She noted she was forced to go to the Apple store to get an answer, but some Instagram users offered their own conclusion.
The confusing phenomena appears to show Coates in two different mirrors, striking three different poses between the mirrors and where she stands.
“I went wedding dress shopping and the fabric of reality crumbled. This is a real photo, not photoshopped, not a pano, not a Live Photo,” Coates wrote as a caption for the photo.
“If you can’t see the problem, please keep looking and then you won’t be able to unsee it.
"Please enjoy this glitch in the matrix/photo that me nearly vomit in the street. Also, I’m engaged!”
While many users jokingly suggested she had stumbled upon alternate versions of herself due to the mirrors being portals, others gave more grounded explanations.
“It’s very simple. When taking any photo with a modern cellphone, especially in low light, it takes scans from left to right. Any movement will be captured even if not a pano because the mirrors are staticky placed, but the subject is moving,” a user wrote.
“Seriously, people? Almost any high level phone takes multiple shots and merges 'best ones'. Mystery solved, go home,” one user wrote addressing the shocked comments.
“It is how the phone took multiple pictures and stitched together a composite. Similar to how modern phones pick the best faces in group photos,” another user wrote.
Coates said in her Instagram story that she went to the Apple store to question staff about the phenomenon and essentially got the same response.
She recalled the Apple employee told her: "An iPhone is not a camera, it's a computer. When an iPhone takes a photo it takes a series of burst images very quickly - even though it's not a pano and it's not a live photo, it's none of the things you all very cleverly thought it might be.
"It takes a series of images from left to right. What it's done at the exact moment that it crossed behind your back, you raised your arms in that half a split second and it's made a completely different image on the other side.
"It's made an AI decision and it's stitched those two photos together."