I found this top quality Afterimage illusion and started to write an article about it. The image was titled “rick roll illusion”, so I titled the article accordingly. The afterimage looked like the negative image of Bob Dylan, but Rick Roll is someone I never heard of. So I did a little research and was surprised by the results I received. Apparently, Rick-rolling is a prank and Internet meme involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up” written and produced by Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, and Pete Waterman known as Stock Aitken Waterman.
The meme is a classic bait and switch: a person provides a link they claim is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to the Astley video. The URL can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true source of the link without clicking (and thus satisfying their curiosity). A person who falls for the prank is said to be “rickrolled”. The practice began as a variant of an earlier prank called duckrolling, in which a link to a popular celebrity or news item would instead lead to a photoshopped picture of a duck with wheels.
Concerning the illusion, it works in the same way as Jesus Afterimage. You just have to stare at the little plus sign in the middle for about a minute, and then quickly look at the white surface. The effect will be stronger if you blink your eyes repeatedly.
