Optical illusions in a Honda advertisement

YouTube link.

Clever use of forced perspective, trompe-l'œil, and other devices in this advertisement apparently filmed in Lake Wobegon.

Excellent example of the Ponzo Illusion

The above image was created by 'shopping three identical images of a car onto a photograph of a street.  The context of the photo (a receding street) creates in your mind the illusion that the cars are of different sizes - but they are exactly the same. ( I had to measure them to convince myself.)

At Neatorama, Alex Santoso has appended an animated gif to confirm the equality of the car images.

Here's another Ponzo Illusion:

Yes, get out your ruler.  We'll wait...

Reflections on a broken bicycle

Discussed/explained at Reddit.

Photo credit: Sylvia Mehnert, who photographed the bike in Copenhagen.

Explain this train's motion

 

This video was posted at New Scientist, which offers a prize to the first person who can correctly explain how the illusion is created.

Courtesy of neuroscientist Al Seckel, the video is free of editing effects or computer-generated imagery. "There is one train; it is as long as you see," he says. The illusion, presented in his newly published digital book that delves into the science of the world's best illusions, continues to fool Nobel laureates and other great minds when presented at conferences.

So far there are over 100 comments at the New Scientist post.

Two roses for you on Valentine's Day

The one above (via Mighty Optical Illusions) illustrates the phenomenon of pareidolia.  The one below (via The Soul is Bone) is a "double color Aquarius hybrid tea rose" posted at Facebook.

The text in the "square" is NOT magnified

First of all, there really isn't a "square" in the upper left part of the image.  Your brain creates a white square by extending the margins of the four black  three-quarter-circles.  But that's not the main point of the illusion, as explained at Mighty Optical Illusions:

When the brain sees an image like this, it interprets depth relationships to perceive the square as set on top of black disks – as a result, the inside of the square is perceived as being closer to your eyes than its surroundings, ultimately creating visual illusion that makes you think the area within the square is enlarged!

The link will guide you to a site with similar examples.

These girls are not dwarves

It's an unintentional optical illusion created by the positioning of the members of the wedding party.  Found at Mighty Optical Illusions.

Black-and-white candy-striped CIRCLES

Not spirals.  If you don't believe me, trace one with your cursor.

I love optical illusions, and have stored about 40 of them in the blog.  When checking to see if I had done this one before (in black-and-white, in 2010), I rediscovered the wonderful illusion that I've reposted below this one.

Image by Philip Taaffe, via Therapy in Minneapolis.

Count the circles - The Coffer Illusion

Most people view this as a set of door panels. It may take quite a while to convince oneself that there are actually 16 circles in the image...

(Reposted from 2009)

Two perfect circles

With a hat tip to Alex Santoso, who found this excellent optical illusion on Twitter and posted it at Neatorama.

This is not a GIF -

- even though it appears to move.  I found this at Mighty Optical Illusions, where the explanation offered was that it "has something to do with microsaccades."

The same explanation was offered at Discover Magazine for this image:

As you’ll notice, the circles seem to rotate in response to where you look at the illusion. So Macknik and his colleagues tracked the movement of people’s eyes as they gazed at two of these wheels on a computer screen. Their subjects kept a finger pressed on a button, lifting it whenever they seemed to see the wheels move.

Macnick and his colleagues found a tight correlation between the onset of the illusion and a kind of involuntary movement our eyes make, known as microsaccades. Even when we’re staring at a still object, our eyes keep darting around. These movements, called microsaccades, help us compensate for a peculiar property of the eye: if we stare at an object for too long, the signals each photoreceptor sends to the brain become weaker. Microsaccades refresh the photoreceptors with a different input and breath new life into our perception.

More at the link, via The Dish.

The "Ponzo illusion"

The two red lines are [almost exactly - see the link] the same length.

Used at Discover magazine to illustrate the astronomical phenomenon that makes the moon appear larger when it is near the horizon.

"Inattentional blindness"

It's a special type of "blindness" that 's explained below the fold.  First, look at the picture and count the number of red circles you see.

Are there five red balls - or six?

Now - look away from the photo and describe to someone exactly what you saw.  Most people fail at this.


What you saw (in addition to the five red balls) was "a real photo of the hands of Cuban man Yoandri Hernandez Garrido, who has polydactyly, which means he has extra digits on his hands (he also has an extra toe on each foot.)... This is called "inattentional blindness", where we can't see what's right in front of us because we're not paying attention to it."

Found at Deceptology.

An amazing road

The cars and trucks drive along this road, then they have to go up this really steep hill to get to the tollbooths, then they drive back down the hill to where the road flattens out again.

Found at 22 Words.

Hues

Yes, the loud colors hurt my eyes too, but I'm posting the image for its qualities as an optical illusion.  In the top figure, the orange at the left and the red at the right are the same color, and in the lower one, the yellowish-green on the left and the bluish-green at the right are also identical.

Found at Mighty Optical Illusions, where the screencap I've embedded can be viewed as a dynamic gif.

Todorovic's dartboard illusion

The two areas at the tips of the arrows are colored identically (the post at Mighty Optical Illusions offers this minor caveat: "Well, at least they should be! Please bear in mind that the picture you see below was first scanned and then uploaded by the person who sent it to me, so they might not actually be the same.")

I  had the same doubts you do, so I took little screencaps of the areas near the arrowheads and enlarged them.  Here they are, side-by-side:

Pixellated, to be sure, but I'm willing to accept that there is no substantial difference in color - certainly not to the degree seemingly apparent in the original image.

Optical illusions are such fun.  If you want to browse more of them, I have about thirty more posted in this category in the blog.

Not a flying carpet

This photo was called an "accidental optical illusion" when it was posted at Reddit.  I think that's a very apt description.  Apart from the flag shadow paralleling the board, there's also the flagpole shadow oriented reasonably well re the microphone boom.  Very cool illusion.

If you stare fixedly at this image... it will disappear

The phenomenon is called Troxler's fading.  Via an excellent AskScience thread at Reddit, where there is an informed discussion.

Very cool.

Shades of gray optical illusion

Which of these rhomboids is darker in color?  Top or bottom?  Are you sure?

Cover the area between the two gray areas with your finger.

This is similar to the "checkershadow" illusion (here, and with video here) (and sort of here).

The "checkershadow" illusion

YouTube link. 

Four years ago I blogged an image of the checkershadow illusion.  Now a video version is available.

Via PharmaGossip.