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An interesting variation is to have the background and foreground move in ''opposite'' directions. This creates an effect of rotation. An early example is the scene in ''[[Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937 film)|Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs]]'' where the evil Queen drinks her potion, and her surroundings appear to spin around her.
==The repeating pattern/animation
Scrolling displays built up of individual character blocks can be made to 'float' over a repeating background layer by animating the background characters in order to portray the parallax effect. This was often achieved using a scrolling star-field, but sometimes a more intricate or multi-directional effect was achieved, such as in the game 'Parallax' by [[Sensible Software]].
== The layer
Some display systems support multiple background layers that can be scrolled independently in horizontal and vertical directions and [[Compositing|composited]] on one another. On such a display system, a game can produce parallax by simply changing each layer's horizontal position by a different amount in the same direction. Layers that move more quickly are perceived to be closer to the virtual camera. However, placing too much in front of the ''playfield'', the layer containing the objects with which the player interacts, obscures the action of the game and may distract the player.
=== The sprite
If there is much in the way of the [[sprite (computer graphics)|sprite]]s (individually controllable moving objects drawn by hardware on top of or behind the layers) available on the display system, the programmer may want to make a pseudo-layer out of sprites. ''[[Star Force]]'', an overhead-view vertically-scrolling shooter for [[NES]], used this for its starfield, and ''[[Final Fight]]'' for the Super NES used this technique for the layer immediately in front of the main playfield.
== The raster
In [[raster graphics]], the lines of pixels in an image are typically composited and refreshed in top-to-bottom order, and there is a slight delay, called [[horizontal blank]], between drawing one line and drawing the next line.
Games designed for older graphical chipsets, such as those of the [[History of video game consoles (third generation)|third]] and [[History of video game consoles (fourth generation)|fourth]] generations of video game consoles, those of dedicated [[TV game]]s, or those of similar handheld systems, take advantage of the raster characteristics to create the illusion of more layers.
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