Instructions:
1. Stare at the image for 10 seconds
2. Look at something — your hand, a book, your friend
3. Enjoy!
For more on illusions — and the delight of our buggy minds — see Al Seckel’s 2004 TEDTalk.
Pavement drawings
It seems difficult to believe but these drawings are nothing more than chalk on the surface of a pavement leading to perspective effects inducing dizziness and vertigo.
Source: Julian Beever.
The hussar and its horse
Rotate it upside down and the hussar becomes its own horse.
Street, climbing or not?
Man or boy?
Simply rotate one and you get the other.
Not a pure optical illusion, but a compelling illusion.
Tactile illusions: Seven ways to fool your sense of touch
And you thought that your brain could only mess with your vision! Graham Lawton, New Scientist, puts his sense of touch to the test.
Imagine you are lying in the bath with your toes poking out of the water. A drip starts to form on the tap; you watch as it grows, then drops onto your big toe. Ooh! Not pleasant – but was the drip boiling hot or icy cold? It’s impossible to tell.
What you just experienced was a tactile illusion – something psychologists are increasingly interested in. For at least 200 years, they have used visual and auditory illusions to uncover the inner workings of sensory perception. Now it is the turn of touch.
- The Aristotle illusion
- Perceptual rivalry
- Boxing clever
- I feel it in my fingers
- Change numbness
- Motion after-effects
- Parchment skin
Source : New Scientist “Tactile illusions: Seven ways to fool your sense of touch“.
The Optical Illusion Girlfriend
If you know some of the classical optical illusions like the following two, you will appreciate the video about an optical illusion in everyday’s life.
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MC escher-related videos
MC Escher impressive body of work inspired many an artist to try and reproduce his most famous illusions in drawing, engraving and painting. Some also produced excellent videos to support this.
MC Escher
All lovers of optical illusions must see the work of Maurits Cornelis Escher (aka MC Escher), Dutch graphic artist whose paintings and engravings are clearly inspired by the limits of our vision and our brain.
He is well known for impossible perspectives like the following:
Or the complicated Relativity engraving:
(You may be interested to notice the CAD work based upon exactly this art work).
But M.C. Escher also worked on repeating patterns and their intrisic complexity for the human mind.
So, I wanted to point you tho the best sources for information about MC Escher and for his best works.
- The official MC Escher web site, with an extended gallery.
- “The mathematical art of MC Escher“, is an extended description of the pattern repeating paintings of the Dutch artist.
- Wikipedia page about MC Escher.
- MC Escher life and work (from the USA National Gallery of Art).