Those Virtual Speed-Bumps

A reader worries:

Is this for real?   It's a really bad idea, if so.  My area of scientific expertise is the learning of new visual cues that affect perception.  These optical illusion speed bumps are a lovely example of "visual statistics pollution" (Backus, 2001).  In order to construct perceptual representations, our brains exploit statistical regularities in the visual world.  This is why artists paint a shadow at a person's feet if they want the person to appear to be standing on the ground.  Our visual systems continually monitor our retinal images to update their knowledge of these statistics.  Creating flat objects that contain depth cues (in this case shading and perspective cues) will, over time, literally train our brains that these cues are unreliable, or worse, that they indicate the absence of a bump. Really really bad idea.