Interactive Movie - Curveball

If you look directly at the "spinning" ball in this illusion by Arthur Shapiro, it appears to fall straight down. But if you look to one side, the ball appears to curve to one side. The ball appears to swerve because our peripheral vision system cannot process all of its features independently. Instead, our brains combine the downward motion of the ball and its leftward spin to create the impression of a curve. Line-of-sight (or foveal) vision, on the other hand, can extract all the information.

http://www.newscientist.com