Ed in the Clouds

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I've done a fair bit of green screen with kids in school.  This is better.  I'm astonished at some of these clips, where it seems to me it would have been easier to film the real scene.  What do I know?  I guess there are all sorts of financial and logistical and operational reasons why this happens...

Each year since 2005, neuroscientists Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik have run a contest for "Best Illusion of the Year". Here are some of the finalists.

The illusion of sex

In the Illusion of Sex, two faces are perceived as male and female. However, both faces are actually versions of the same androgynous face. One face was created by increasing the contrast of the androgynous face, while the other face was created by decreasing the contrast. The face with more contrast is perceived as female, while the face with less contrast is perceived as male. The Illusion of Sex demonstrates that contrast is an important cue for perceiving the sex of a face, with greater contrast appearing feminine, and lesser contrast appearing masculine.
Russell, R. (2009) A sex difference in facial pigmentation and its exaggeration by cosmetics. Perception, (38)1211-1219.

Silencing awareness of change by background motion

Play the movie while looking at the small white speck in the center of the ring. At first, the ring is motionless and it’s easy to tell that the dots are changing color. When the ring begins to rotate, the dots suddenly appear to stop changing. But in reality they are changing the entire time. Take a look.

The Leaning Tower Illusion
Here is a novel illusion that is as striking as it is simple. The two images of the Leaning Tower of Pisa are identical, yet one has the impression that the tower on the right leans more, as if photographed from a different angle. The reason for this is because the visual system treats the two images as if part of a single scene. Normally, if two adjacent towers rise at the same angle, their image outlines converge as they recede from view due to perspective, and this is taken into account by the visual system. So when confronted with two towers whose corresponding outlines are parallel, the visual system assumes they must be diverging as they rise from view, and this is what we see. The illusion is not restricted to towers photographed from below, but works well with other scenes, such as railway tracks receding into the distance. What this illusion reveals is less to do with perspective, but how the visual system tends to treat two side-by-side images as if part of the same scene. However hard we try to think of the two photographs of the Leaning Tower as separate, albeit identical images of the same object, our visual system regards them as the ‘Twin Towers of Pisa’, whose perspective can only be interpreted in terms of one tower leaning more than the other.
The Leaning Tower illusion: a new illusion of perspective Frederick A. A. Kingdom, Ali Yoonessi, Elena Gheorghiu Perception. 2007. 36(3):475-477

The Freezing Rotation Illusion

An object (e.g. airplane) is turning on a surround (greenhouse), which is swaying back and forth. Observe the rotation of the object. Is it turning smoothly all the time? Or does it “freeze” from time to time? Convince yourself by covering the swaying surround that the object is really turning continuously. If the object is swaying back and forth and the surround is turning continuously we do not perceive a slow-down of the surround. Assuming a stable surround, our visual system probably uses the surround as a reference to measure motion of the included objects.

World’s Largest Lightness Illusion
In this illusion, it appears that there is one set of black figures and one set of white figures. In fact, the two sets of figures are exactly identical. They appear different because the surrounding regions they are on cause the visual system to segment the images into layers. Thus one set appears to be white figures behind dark clouds, and the other set appears to be dark figures behind light clouds. If you cut out the figures you will see that they are identical!

Coffer Illusion
First time viewers of this display invariably do not see the 16 circles segmented from the background. Rather, they see a series of rectangles that they frequently describe as “door panels”. The illusion pits segmentation cues against what appears to be a very strong prior to interpret the image as a series of 3-D structures “coffers” with closed boundaries. (A coffer is a decorative sunken panel.) It appears that the prior involves both closure and shape-from shading assumptions. The Coffer Illusion is a variation on Gianni Sarcone’s “Op Art illusion”.

You can view their website here: http://illusioncontest.neuralcor...

  

David Cole, a designer for startups, especially YCs.

93 votes by Sean Owczarek, Arvind Shrihari, Elizabeth L. Mead, (more)

Proof + Explanation: http://web.mit.edu/persci/people...

And a related one, the blue and green below are the same:

Proof + Explanation: http://dankaminsky.com/2010/12/1...

I've also always been fond of those intense animated spirals that you stare into and then everything looks all wobbly when you look around the room. This is probably the best of those:

http://neave.com/strobe/

The longer you stare the better!

4 Comments •   2:46 on Sun Oct 30 2011 

  

Seb Paquet, B. Sc. in Physics, Ph.D. in Computer ...

33 votes by Edwin Khoo, Andy Cheung, Jakub Tlałka, (more)

(View full-size: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~morae...)

4 Comments •   15:24 on Sat Nov 13 2010 

  

Garrick Saito, ...

26 votes by Elizabeth L. Mead, Arvind Shrihari, Jeremy Miles, (more)

How many black dots are there?


Sidewalk drawings

1 Comment •   1:26 on Sun Oct 30 2011 

  

Adisa Nicholson, Web developer, Music producer, Novelist

18 votes by Bradley Voytek, Will Wister, Tatiana Estévez, (more)

Add Comment •   14:48 on Mon Oct 31 2011 

  

Jimmy Chion, Stanford BA in Psych

18 votes by Ramesh Thulasiram, Jean Hsu, Mike Barnard, (more)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The...

The ballerina is an ambiguous motion optical illusion. It can be spinning CW or CCW, and it's almost impossible to control your perception.

The spinning ballerina illusion is an illusion that's hard to believe. People think that the computer just randomly switches the direction, but you can easily disprove this by watching the illusion (on one screen)with a friend and saying when it switches for you. It will switch at different times for each of you.

4+ Comments •   6:16 on Sun Oct 30 2011 

  

Andrew J. Young, UK-based designer and teacher

14 votes by Elizabeth L. Mead, James Mcfeley, Andy Lemke, (more)

M.C. Escher 'Ascending and Descending', 1960

Add Comment •   18:11 on Wed Apr 13 2011 

  

Andy Lemke, metaphysically wrinkle-free polymath

11 votes by Tatiana Estévez, Adisa Nicholson, Marvin Lensink, (more)

Anamorphic pavement art. Here are some by Edgar Müller (the master) but google him for more:

1+ Comments •   16:14 on Mon Oct 31 2011 

  

Nick Alvarez, B.A. Philosophy, Psychology; M.A. Phi...

7 votes by Arvind Shrihari, David Cole, Tatiana Estévez, (more)

Motion Induced Blindness:

Add Comment •   16:10 on Sun Oct 30 2011 

  

Marvin Lensink, tech - no green thumb

7 votes by Sean Owczarek, Tatiana Estévez, Will Wister, (more)

Roy Liechtenstein House #1, Sculpture Garden, National Gallery, Wash. D.C.

The illusion stops people in their tracks. The house appears to turn on a vertical axis. 

1 Comment •   15:46 on Mon Oct 31 2011 

  

Ariel Williams, Dreamer that does stuff..

8 votes by Danilo Bargen, Lee Kwok Onn, Serge Shirokov, (more)

There is no such thing as magenta colored light it is an illusion of the mind!

.| So I now present Magenta! 
VWhat your seeing above could be considered an illusion because your brain is abstracting what the combination or mid-point of red and blue would look like if the color spectrum looped. In reality the color spectrum does not loop or curve back on itself there is no wavelength of light in-between red meets blue. However when you see the two colors at once mixed you see magenta a color that doesn't exist.

Can you find magenta in the color spectrum of visible light? :D

Ref: http://www.null-hypothesis.co.uk... For a more detailed explanation.

.

Add Comment •   11:57 on Tue Nov 01 2011 

  

Sjoerd Lagarde, MSc-student Artificial Intelligence

3 votes by Pietro Pi, Charles Parnot, and Raunak Kalra

The Necker cube is a famous (and I think great) optical illusion. There are two ways to view the cube: a front-view and a top-down view. Blinking your eyes might help to switch between the two interpretations. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nec... for more information.

One other optical illusion I found really fascinating can be seen on the website of New Scientist: http://www.newscientist.com/movi.... It is titled 'Six ways to see two curves' (since it depends on movement, I do not have an inline image available).

 The following video shows a cool optical illusion, called the flashed face distortion effect. The youtube video links to a website with more information:http://mbthompson.com/research/. 

Add Comment •   9:3 on Mon Oct 31 2011