Are these different images? Baffling optical illusion takes the internet by storm

We have seen how curvature blindness can trick people into seeing curved lines as zig-zag patterns, but this time, a simple photograph of a brick road is breaking the internet.

These two photographs of the same street, positioned side-by-side, look slightly different, apparently due to some variation in the photographer's angle or height. The image on the right appears to be running steeper than the one on the left.

As the caption explains, these are exact same photos, similar to each other pixel by pixel and there is no difference between them whatsoever.

A Reddit user even posted an animation showcasing how perfectly the complicated lines making up the brick pattern of the street ran over each other when the image on the right was placed on top of the left one:

The image was also not tweaked or flipped in any way, so what is this effect? Internet users too were forced to bend their minds over the weirdness of this optical illusion.

"This is super weird. I can tell that it's the same picture, but something makes my brain not want to believe it. I wonder what specifically causes that to happen?" said one Reddit user. Some even used their own ways to check if the images were exact same copies.

"As an experiment, I covered the bottom half, up to just under the headlight on the white car, and they look the same. As I slowly revealed the rest of the picture it reached a point right around where the sidewalk reaches the edge of the picture and my brain flipped and saw them differently," said another.

"I held a straightedge against the two pictures, aligned with the tires on the truck driving down the street. The truck on the left appears "higher" than the truck on the right," third user said.

"I have edge of the ruler flush with my monitor edge, so I'm pretty sure it was level, but anyone want to double check?"

The exact reason why our brain perceives identical images as different is still unclear but one suggested it is because the two streets appear to converge at the bottom of the pictures.

"Your brain tries to perceive this as one image with a fork in the road and therefore the street in the picture on the left must be at a different angle than the picture on the right."