Watch these new videos for the 2023 Best Illusion of the Year Contest

The video entries for the Illusion of the Year Contest 2023 are up. They include optical, audible, and physical illusions, You can watch all of them here, and cast your vote by rating them. Here are my favorites:

An ordinary object facing toward a mirror, when reflected in a mirror, changes its orientation to the opposite with respect to the mirror surface. Our objects, however, just translate into the mirror without changing their orientations. This illusion is strong in the sense that the illusion does not disappear even if we change our viewpoint in a certain area.

XRAYHEAD creates the striking illusion of seeing a skeleton inside one's head when the experimenter touches the interior skeleton. This illusion is examined in a darkroom using a setup where the participant views a specially designed skeleton through a half mirror, and the experimenter touches the participant and the skeleton's head with both hands. In this specific arrangement, the distance between the skeleton head and the palm of the experimenter's hand determines the brightness of the skeleton. In our laboratory exhibition, 77 out of 101 participants reported experiencing a strong tactile sensation of the illusory skeleton within their heads.

The illusion is of a LEGO car driving through a solid wall. The reality is there is a car sized hole in the middle of the wall for toy to drive through. The missing brick work is replaced by an anamorphic illusion on the floor behind the wall. When viewed from one perspective, the vertical bricks and horizontal bricks line up and appear to be one solid wall. The pattern camouflages the edges and makes it extremely hard to distinguish any discontinuities.

The Accelerando Illusion is an original musical illusion implying an endlessly rising tempo. Try clapping along! A steady whole-note morphs into a half-note pulse, then quarter-notes, eighth-notes and soon you are at the limit of how fast your hands can move…yet the music sounds the same as when you started! Make sure to start slowly; the tempo begins at a moderate 115 beats per minute, but ends with a BPM somewhere in the region of 100 quintillion!