HOME |
RSS | 
This woman appears to be floating above the sand, Star Wars skiff style, an optical illusion caused by the shadow of a flag. For her next trick, she will make a day at the beach super boring with the power of her speech!
Photo Credit: Jen Stark
By now, most devout artistic-leaning internet surfers and of course, Neatoramans have seen Jen Stark’s amazing 3D paper sculptures which consists of hundreds of sheets of paper meticulously cut away. Her latest art show displays a series of wooden dowels that have been colored to create an optical illusion. Depending on your point of view, it resembles either the top of a cupcake or from the side, a giant colored pencil. Either way, it looks cool, and Stark’s continual mastery of color is superb to say the least.
Link via My Modern Met
What better way to comemmorate your love of optical illusions than to get it tattooed on your back? Our own Jill Harness wrote the definitive Top 10 Optical Illusion Tattoos over at Mighty Optical Illusions blog: Link – via Rue The Day
How do you turn pretty girls into ugly trolls without make ups or special effects? All you need is some good ol' optical illusion. Here's the Flashed Face Distortion Effects:
Like many interesting scientific discoveries, this one was an accident. Sean Murphy, an undergraduate student, was working alone in the lab on a set of faces for one of his experiments. He aligned a set of faces at the eyes and started to skim through them. After a few seconds, he noticed that some of the faces began to appear highly deformed and grotesque. He looked at the especially ugly faces individually, but each of them appeared normal or even attractive. We called it the “Flashed Face Distortion Effect” and wanted to share it with the world, so we put it on YouTube.
The effect seems to depend on processing each face in light of the others. By aligning the faces at the eyes and presenting them quickly, it becomes much easier to compare them, so the differences between the faces are more extreme. If someone has a large jaw, it looks almost ogre-like. If they have an especially large forehead, then it looks particularly bulbous.
See it for yourself in this video clip:
Link | YouTube Link - via The Presurfer
Photo: kennysarmy [Flickr]
Pray tell, which way is he looking? Don’t see it? Look closer … via Kuriositas
I know you are familiar with this picture of workers on the Brooklyn Bridge, taken in 1914 by Eugene de Salignac for the city of New York. But wait… why is the guy on the right so much bigger than the others? He’s not. Rob at the What Is It? Blog altered the picture to make it an optical illusion!
A few weeks ago I saw this old picture on the web of the Brooklyn Bridge painters and thought it was perfect for the classic perspective optical illusion, I made an exact copy of the person on the left of the photo and placed it on the right.
Pretty neat, wouldn’t you say? -Thanks, Rob!
This is what you get when you combine optical illusions with a vaudeville act. The performer is named Ouka. -via Cynical-C
Comments Off
Remember our post about the "magnetic slope" illusion that won the 2010 Illusion of the Year competition?
Well, the maker of that optical illusion, math professor Kokichi Sugihara of Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences in Japan has more. Take a look at his clip, titled Impossible Motions 2: Link [Flash video clip] – via NPR
Comments Off First, watch the video. Then come back and read the rest of this description. J.W. Suchow and G.A. Alvarez studied how motion affected awareness of color change in their research on change blindness. Try it yourself!
Keep your eyes fixed on the small white mark in the center. At first, the ring is stationary and it’s easy to tell that the dots are changing. A few seconds later, the ring begins to rotate and the dots suddenly appear to stop changing.
But play the movie again, this time looking directly at one of the dots and following it as the ring rotates. You will see that, in fact, the dots had been changing the whole time, even during the rotation—you just didn’t notice it. This failure to detect that moving objects are changing is silencing.
The findings were published in the journal Current Biology, with an abstract available online. Link -Thanks, Rob Hartmann!
Remember the optical illusion of the spinning silhouette which spins clockwise or counterclockwise? Popular e-quizzes claim that your perception of which way the silhouette spins is indicative of whether you’re left- or right-brained. Well, leave it to scientists to bust that myth:
Niko Troje says that a reported preference for seeing the silhouette spinning clockwise rather than counter-clockwise is dependent upon the angle at which the viewer is seeing the image. [...]
Dr. Troje and his team found that a view-from-above bias (VFA) is what makes the viewer prone to seeing the silhouette in a certain way, not one’s personality or whether the viewer is left- or right-brained. When shown the silhouette illusion, the study’s 24 participants most often reported that the woman was spinning counter-clockwise if viewed from above, and clockwise if viewed from below. Thus, the viewing angle causes the difference in perception.
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] | Article at Science Daily | Niko Troje’s website
Image: Duncan Caldwell
Is the carving above the oldest optical illusion ever made? Amateur archaeologist Duncan Caldwell thinks so. He explains:
Perhaps the most dramatic candidate for a mammoth-bison image meeting this requirement and being an intentional illusion isn’t on a cave wall, but on a carving from a spear-thrower from the site of Canecaude. In this piece, as Caldwell sees it, it’s not that the animals share a contour or a few lines, but that just two small details allow the entire image to be read as either of the two species, and seeing one causes the other to "disappear."
The details in question are the eyes. Caldwell describes how there is "both an upper eye, which turns the crescent beneath it into a tusk, and lower eye, beside the front leg, that transforms the same crescent which we just interpreted as a "tusk", into a bison’s overhead horn." Looking back and forth between the eyes then, we are able to see the entire shape transform from one animal to the other, an effect much more like the classic Gestalt shift of the duck-rabbit.
Significantly, it is hard to think of other reasons for the unusual position of the eyes. First of all, their delicately carved shapes show that they were made intentionally, and are not just accidental markings. Secondly, the details of the body of the animal, its tusk/horns, long hair, and legs are all fairly realistically represented showing the artist’s ability to make an accurate full profile view if desired.
Andrew Howley of National Geographic has the full story: Link – via metafilter
The structure of your individual brain has a lot to do with how you perceive optical illusions. Researchers at University College London asked subjects how they perceived illusions of size such as the one used in this video, and then measured the size of each subject’s visual cortex -the amount of brain matter devoted to processing vision.
The researchers then took MRIs of the subjects’ brains. What they discovered astonished them – there was an almost perfect link between the size of somebody’s visual cortex was and how much the optical illusion affected them. The smaller the visual cortex, the more a person was taken in by the optical illusion. Those with the largest visual cortices were also those most able to see the circles’ true sizes.
Read more, and see the different illusions used, at io9. Link -Thanks, Greg Ross!
Dark Roasted Blend has a very nifty gallery of some of the neatest optical illusions you’ll see today. I particularly like this one above, Shadow Illusion by Francis Tabary – a set of hanging letters which shadows spell different things depending on the direction of the illuminations.
Comments Off 
How do you keep cars from zooming too fast in a crowded parking lot? How about an anamorphic optical illusion?
In Vancouver, the BCAA Traffic Safety Foundation and the safety group Preventable have teamed up and placed an optical illusion of a little girl chasing a ball down the street in an effort to curb reckless driving.
The reasoning behind the display, which costs roughly $15,000, as explained by David Dunn of the BCAA Traffic Safety Foundation:“We need to expect the unexpected because anything could happen, whether it is a 3D image on the road … or whether it’s a live child or a dog running in front of the car, these are all things that we have to be able to control for in a vehicle”
What do you think? Good idea or bad?
We’ve previously featured the optical illusions of artist Leando Erlich. One that we’ve missed is this installation at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan. It looks like a swimming pool, but is actually two sheets of acrylic with a few inches of water between them. Visitors to the exhibit at the lower level appear to be walking around at the bottom of a swimming pool. More pictures at the link.
Link via DudeCraft | Artist Website | Museum Website
See it? Made by London creative brand agency Cow – via Cakehead Loves Evil
The blue elements in the image above appear to be a arranged in a continuous spiral, but in fact they form a series of concentric circles. Your brain will argue so strongly for a spiral that you may need to run your mouse cursor around the circles a few times to convince yourself.
Image credit to Akiyoshi Kitaoka 2009. Via Moillusions.
You may need to click/enlarge the image to see the subtlety of the optical illusion. Then the question to ponder will be whether this is the result of image editing, or whether it was created by clever woodcrafting with veneer.
Photo from Erik Minnema‘s photostream, via.
Found at Cliff Pickover’s always excellent Reality Carnival. It took me a while to get it!
Previously on Neatorama: The Math Book: Milestones in the History of Math
YouTube user brusspup is fond of creating optical illusions. We’ve recently featured one that looks like two lug nuts. His latest is this Pac-Man scene painted on the walls of a house.
via Urlesque
If you don’t find this optical illusion of two lug nuts by YouTube user brusspup amazing, you’re nuts!
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Bopple.
Similar in principle to the colored spirals, the shades of blue, and the famous checkershadow illusion, this video demonstrates that our brains judge colors by comparing an object or area to other objects or areas rather than assessing the color directly.
Found at Reddit, where there is a discussion thread re the illusion.
Apple executive Jeff Dauber has a backyard deck that will not, despite initial impressions, suck you into a wormhole and then throw you back in time. He had architect Thom Flauders design the piece to create an optical illusion of curves where there are only flat surfaces:
“I wanted someone to barf when they look at it,” says Dauber, a senior executive at Apple. “The deck looks like it is sloping away from you.” Dauber is not your standard-issue Silicon Valley techie; he’s covered in tattoos and owns an impressive, challenging collection of contemporary art (including a mosque made out of gun parts, by the sculptor Al Farrow). Five years ago, he hired Faulders to transform his Potrero Hill residence into a bachelor-pad-cum-art-gallery (see “Puzzle Master,” June 2006). The architect gave the space visual interest while still preserving it as a backdrop for Dauber’s art. Notably, the ceiling and walls, which appear to undulate, are made of a smooth pattern of interlocking CNC-milled MDF panels.
Link via Fast Company
If one looks closely at the construction of this figure, it quickly becomes apparent that something is just, well…wrong with it.
This initially-baffling video exhibits how the human visual system can subconsciously interpret and thoroughly "see" a three-dimensional object even though it is impossible for such an object to exist. Thankfully, the creator reveals how it was constructed.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by flagler.
Swiss artist Felice Varini is known for his massive art installations that show different images depending on the viewer’s vantage point. Recently, he created an optical illusion that covered the entire Swiss town of Vercorin. In the picture above, it looks like rings have been drawn over an image, but what Varini has done is painted walls and roofs at particular angels to give this impression. Click on the link for pictures that show how Varini crated this illusion.
Link via Make | Artist’s Website | Previously on Neatorama: Felice Varini’s Ellipse Anamorphic Art
This video demonstrates that the human eye (and the visual cortex of human brain) are better at detecting edges and contrasts than they are at determining actual shades of colors. There is a discussion thread about this illusion at Reddit.
If you like the neat color optical illusion posted by Neatoramanaut Minnesotastan from the Upcoming Queue, check this one out by Rob Jenkins of the University of Glasgow and Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire:
The picture below shows two monkeys. Set your computer monitor to maximum brightness and then stare at the centre of the picture for about 30 seconds without moving your eyes. Next, look to a white wall and blink a few times. The monkeys should suddenly transform into a perfect picture of Darwin!
Previously on Neatorama: 10 Fun Facts About Charles Darwin
The reason they look [like] different colors is because our brain judges the color of an object by comparing it to surrounding colors. In this case, the stripes are not continuous as they appear at first glance. The orange stripes don’t go through the “blue” spiral, and the magenta ones don’t go through the “green” one.
If you don’t believe it, see the closeup view at Bad Astronomy. Link – via j-walkblog
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Minnesotastan.
