Seeing broken graphics in the real world almost breaks the brain.

Niigata City is the capital of Niigata Prefecture, but it’s not a particularly bustling town. Walking around the downtown area, it feels quieter than you’d expect from its population of roughly 800,000 people, and overall the vibe is relaxed and pleasant, if not especially exciting.

So it’s all the more startling to see that one spot in Niigata City appears to be the seam of an interdimensional rift.

Okay, maybe that’s not a gateway to another plane of existence. It could just be a graphics rendering glitch in the simulated reality we’re all unknowingly living in. Either way, one part of the Niigata skyline seems to include a structure, the Cozmix Building, whose architecture seems to decide “You know what? I’m gonna go 2-D” as your eyes scan it from left to right.

▼ Third theory: Niigata City is really just a big, full-color M.C. Escher painting.

Actually, of all those possible explanations, the Escher one is closest to the truth, in that the weird appearance of the Cozmix building in the above images is the result of perspective playing tricks on your eyes/mind. The building has an irregular shape, including one section that’s an embedded wedge with a triangular roof.

When viewed from the west at certain angles, the tip of the wedge can be seen but everything behind it, including the wall just around the bend, is completely obscured.

▼ An overhead view of Cozmix, marked in red, shows that the building’s name isn’t the only strange thing about it.

The 10-story Cozmix Building went up in 1997, serving as the home of local radio station Niigata Kenmin FM until the broadcaster ceased operations in the summer of 2020 (though its FM Port 79.0 logo can still be seen on the building’s exterior). The architectural optical illusion has been getting a new wave of attention recently, though, thanks to a tweet by Japanese Twitter user @Soviet_Usako.

Online reactions have included:

“Ah, Niigata City is trying to load in too many objects all at once.”
“Looks like it’s not reading the data chunk properly.”
“Split map bug.”
“My brain can’t process this.”
“I think maybe the building is made out of paper.”

Surprisingly, many netizens have said that, despite living in Niigata, they’d never noticed how weird Cozmix looks from this angle. That’s probably because the visual effect doesn’t occur when looking at the building from Route 7, the main road the runs in front of the building. Instead, you have to go down a narrow side street that runs behind Cozmix, and look up at the building from across a parking lot.

But hey, it sort of makes sense that in order to see the real-world equivalent of a video games graphics glitch, you have to go off the beaten path, right?

Source: BB Building via Jin
Top image: Pakutaso (edited by SoraNews24)
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