This is the View from Inside a 360° Photo in a Photo in a Photo in a…

Whoa… We’ve all seen the so-called “Droste effect” in action—an image that contains itself, so it becomes a photo, in a photo, in a photo, etc. But now you get to look out from inside one! Turns out, it’s just as trippy as it sounds.

This mind and light-bending exploration in photography and math is brought to you by the YouTube channel standupmaths and made possible by a 360° spherical camera.

Basically, Matt and Henry mounted a green screen into a window frame on the side of the video, and then inserted the video itself into that green screen. When they did this, they were not only able to create the standard recursive effect—infinite rectangles showing their video playing inside their video playing inside their video—but, by looking the other way, they also revealed what it’s like to look out of one of these images at the infinite progression in the other direction.

If that all sounds confusing it’s because describing this in text is like trying to explain what a sunrise “feels” like: impossible. Just go out and feel the sunrise… or in this case watch the video.