This is cool - someone took a photo of UFO hovering over the scene of an accident. If you rotate the photo 180 degrees, it almost looks like the UFO is a car in a lake. Read the rest
ついに立体的に動いて見える錯視が完成しました。キューブが回転して見えますね？止まっています pic.twitter.com/nyyWdr5O1E
— じゃがりきん (@jagarikin) February 14, 2020
On Twitter, @jagarikin posted this fantastic example of the "reverse phi illusion." Press play above. The boxes aren't actually rotating. I promise. From SoraNews24:
In very simplified terms, when our eyes see sudden transitions from either light to dark or dark to light, our brains perceive it as motion happening. Take yet another look at @jagarikin’s GIF, and you’ll notice that the edges of the cubes’ blue frames have a sliver of color to them. Sometimes they’re white, sometimes they’re gray, and sometimes they’re black, and as they’re cycling from one to the next, the video’s background is doing the same thing, and the result is the illusionary “rotation” of the cubes.
For more on the reverse phi illusion: "An optical illusion called 'reverse-phi motion' helps explain how we view moving objects, Stanford scientists find" Read the rest
"Twisting reality, one video at a time," VFX artist Kevin Lustgarten regularly churns out amazing optical illusions like this one for our visual pleasure. Read the rest
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).
Rabbits love getting stroked on their nose pic.twitter.com/aYOZGAY6kP
— Dan Quintana (@dsquintana) August 18, 2019
His name is Mischief.
Traffic disappears into a higher dimension, on this bridge. Witchcraft. https://t.co/9jXxSFjXv6 pic.twitter.com/yO9MaGokHy
— Cliff Pickover (@pickover) August 5, 2019
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)
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.
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)
Kokichi Sugihara of Japan is the winner of the 2018 Best Illusion of the Year Contest with his mind-bending entry, "Triply Ambiguous Object."
In this video, Caltech demonstrates the Rabbit Illusion, a "time-traveling illusion trick." It tricked me.
Read the restCaltech 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.
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)
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
