Every year, the nonprofit Neural Correlate Society, an organization "that promotes scientific research into the neural correlates of perception and cognition," holds a competition for the Best Illusion of the Year. This year's winner is the above "Dual Axis Illusion" created by Frank Force (USA).
"This spinning shape appears to defy logic by rotating around both the horizontal and vertical axis at the same time!" reads the description. "To make things even more confusing, the direction of rotation is also ambiguous. Some visual cues in the video will help viewers change their perception."
Below, second prize winner "Change the Color" by Haruaki Fukuda (Japan) and third prize winner "The Rotating Circles Illusion" by Ryan E.B. Mruczek and Gideon Paul Caplovitz (USA).
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Where they're going, they don't need roads. Read the rest
By changing the luminance around the edges of the diamond and the background, you can make it look as though the diamond is moving up, down, right, or left. From a paper in i-Perception titled, "The Perpetual Diamond: Contrast Reversals Along Thin Edges Create the Appearance of Motion in Objects."
by Oliver J. Flynn and Arthur G. Shapiro. Read the rest
Indian animal adoption campaign World for All commissioned these excellent posters in 2017 to promote the cause. [via] Read the rest
As a high school student, I would have enjoyed learning to use ruled paper to draw anamorphic illusions instead of (not) taking notes. (via The Kid Should See This)
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From @rainmaker1973 on Twitter: "Your visual system constantly adapts to all the external stimuli, and this is why if you stare at this picture, it will slowly disappear"
Doesn't work for me!
Previously: Optillusions. Read the rest
When this curious contraption is switched on, an inner circle of white balls appears to be rolling inside the outer circle, but that's actually not the case at all. Below is a video explaining this circular motion illusion. Learn more about the mathematics behind it, specifically Copernicus’ Theorem, and the ingenious hypocycloid mechanical gear design by Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576) over at The Kid Should See This.
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And if shaking your head really fast is, er, problematic, you can also just look at an angle or move away from the screen until the image appears.
Here's an Instructable on how to make your own head-shaking illusions.
(via r/interestingasfuck)
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Kokichi Sugihara of Japan is the winner of the 2018 Best Illusion of the Year Contest with his mind-bending entry, "Triply Ambiguous Object."
[via Futility
Closet] Read the rest
In this video, Caltech demonstrates the Rabbit Illusion, a "time-traveling illusion trick." It tricked me.
Caltech researchers have developed these two new illusions that reveal how the senses can influence each other—in particular, how sound can give rise to visual illusions. These illusions occur so quickly that they illustrate a phenomenon called postdiction (as opposed to prediction) in which a stimulus that occurs later can retroactively affect our perceptions of an earlier event.
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My new favorite subreddit is Accidental Maps, specializing in a pareidolia of places.
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Circle Line Art School explains how to draw this simple but effective anamorphic illusion of cubes falling into a hole in the page.
(via The Kid Should See This)
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After hitting the mute button (YouTube should have a terrible music reporting option), check out this delightful Malaysian selfie museum with lots of trompe-l'œil paintings and optical illusions. Read the rest
Karma the Corgi says it's all about attitude not altitude:
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Steve Mould offers a couple of explanations for the flashed face distortion effect. I've seen this before and it's very strange. When you put pictures of two different people side-by-side and flash several pairs, the faces look like gross caricatures. By way of explaining it, he also presents a couple of other cool visual effects. Read the rest
Look at the above image. The higher the peaks, the more sensitive your eyes are to contrasts at those frequencies. Ian Goodfellow spotted the image in a
scientific paper about spatial frequency analysis and brilliantly
observed that "It's like a graph that is made by perceiving the graph itself." Over at Mind Hacks, Tom Stafford explains the science of spatial frequency, the same concept behind the classic "
Marilyn Einstein" image below that was created by Aude Oliva in 2007. From
Mind Hacks:
Spatial frequency means how often things change in space. High spatial frequency changes means lots of small detail. Spatial frequency is surprisingly important to our visual system – lots of basic features of the visual world, like orientation or motion, are processed first according to which spatial frequency the information is available at...
Spatial frequency is also why, when you’re flying over the ocean, you can see waves which appear not to move. Although your vision is sensitive enough to see the wave, the motion sensitive part of your visual system isn’t as good at the fine spatial frequencies – which creates a natural illusion of static waves.
See Einstein below? Now go a few steps back from your screen and look again:
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