Comedian Tessa Coates shocks internet after sharing insane wedding dress optical illusion

A woman has shocked the internet after sharing a photo of her wedding dress shopping experience.

Taking to the social media platform Instagram, writer and comedian Tessa Coates shared a photo of herself trying on a wedding dress and standing in front of two mirrors.

All appears well until, as she wrote in the caption, “I went wedding dress shopping and the fabric of reality crumbled. This is a real photo, not photoshopped, not a panorama, not a Live Photo,” news.com.au reported.

She added, “If you can’t see the problem, please keep looking, and then you won’t be able to unsee it,” and said the “glitch in the Matrix” almost left her vomiting in the street.

After studying the photo, it became clear to fans the issue is that Coates’ hands are seen in three different positions. The first shows them hanging down by her hips, the second shows one hanging down and one slightly bent in front of her waist while the third shows both her hands clasped together in front of her waist.

Taking to the comment section, many fans were torn between congratulating the star on her engagement, while others were calling the Black Mirror moment “absolutely terrifying”.

One person wrote, “Only you can find the most epic way to announce your engagement – mystery and excitement – congratulations!”, with another adding, “This whole sequence of events is both absolutely terrifying and hilarious.”

A third person wrote, “How is this possible?!?! Magic mirrors,” with another exclaiming, “Obsessed that this is the deranged way you accidentally announced the engagement.”

Insisting that the photo was not created using a special feature such as in a Live Photo or using a burst camera mode, she told fans in a video uploaded to her Instagram story, “I am freaking out, so the first thing I did was go back to the shop and ask if they were in fact mirrors or cameras,” Coates said revealing the shop assistants confirmed they were normal mirrors.

She also showed a tech-savvy colleague who was also “freaking out” about the picture, which resulted in her heading down to a local Apple store to ask an employee if they could reveal the truth of the terrifying photo.

After a lengthy wait, an employee named Roger explained phones are computers, not cameras, and despite not having the Live Photo or burst feature activated, the photo can sometimes pick up movements.

He reportedly told her a possible explanation is that when the photo was taken, she raised her hands to her waist, resulting in the photo showing her mid-movement.

“It’s made like an AI decision and it stitched those two photos together,” Coates recounted. “And one very clever person on Twitter found the exact line on my back - it’s a tiny, tiny bit that’s not completely in line, and that’s where the photos are stitched together.”

She continued to say that Apple’s iPhone and Meta are testing technology where you take multiple photos and your phone chooses the best one. “If you look at the left side, that’s a complete image, if you look at the right side, that’s also a complete image.”

Ultimately, Coates told fans the Apple employee told her the photo had a “one in a million chance” of existing.

This article was first published by the NZ Herald and is republished here with permission.