About One Frame

One Frame is a free daily game about how much you can take in at a glance. A photo flashes up for a fraction of a second, you name what you saw, and each round gives you a little less time than the last.

Why we made it

Your brain works out what it's looking at far faster than it feels like it does. In lab studies, people can tell whether a photo contains an animal within about a tenth of a second, and they pick up the general sense of a scene from a flash lasting a few hundredths of a second. You rarely notice this in everyday life, because the world stays put after you glance at it.

In One Frame the photo doesn't stay put, so you find out exactly how much you caught. Most people are surprised by how often they can name something they saw for a twentieth of a second, and by how quickly it slips away if they hesitate. If you'd like to know more about the research behind it, read How fast can you see?

What we care about

We want One Frame to be a minute of your day that's spent paying attention, so there's no endless feed and no streak to keep alive, only six photos and a score. Everyone gets the same photos on the same day and nobody can peek at the answers, which means your ranking reflects how well you really did. You can play without an account, a name or an email address (see Privacy), and every photo is a real photograph used under an open licence such as Creative Commons, with the photographer credited when it comes back.

Why there are three subjects

How quickly you recognise something depends a lot on how well you know it, so a birdwatcher and a car enthusiast see quite different things in the same flash. That's why Animals, Cars and Landmarks each have their own daily and their own ranking, and you can stick to the subject you know or try one you don't.

How it's paid for

One Frame is free to play and is supported by ads from Google AdSense on the home and end screens. You'll never see an ad during a round, because anything loading in the background could make a 33-millisecond flash stutter.

Get in touch

If you have an idea, spot a bug or have a question about a photo, send it through the contact form, which is where most changes to the game start. For the rules and scoring, see How to play, and if you'd like to improve, have a look at Can you get faster?