Bizarre optical illusion (safe for work)

Everything else
1

Check this out:

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~moraes/illusion.html

2

Neat!

But the day that I have to worry that you’re going to post NSFW optical illusions is gonna be a wierd day Lloyd!

:D

3

Ya never know in this crowd.

:lol:

4

man that one gives me eye strain REALLY fast.

5

Somewhat comparable to this one.

And this one should be an excellent desktop background, too. :)

-Julian

6

http://emocore.shackspace.com/cantstoplooking.gif

:)

Edit: Okay, I can’t stand looking at that so I just linked to it instead. Yug.

7

This site has been awfully SFW lately. Did Whitta get a job?

8

Here are a ton of them
http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/saishin-e.html
And yet more
http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/o1saishe.html

9

This is one of my favorite illusions, and it won’t give you a headache:
http://web.mit.edu/persci/people/adelson/checkershadow_illusion.html

  • Alan
10

Yeah, the checkershadow one is mind blowing. The first time I saw it, it freaked me out so much I didn’t trust the digital tools. I wasn’t completely convinced until I covered my monitor with paper so that I could see the two squares.

11

Someone explain to me if there’s a trick to the checkershadow one? I have to say, I’m failing to notice anything happening with it.

12

There’s nothing happening… it’s just that the two squares with letters are the same shade of grey but don’t appear to be.

13

For once it’s your own lying eyes that pwnd you Brownbuckle!

:wink:

14

Interestingly, some of those work for me, but a lot don’t. Cumulatively, however, they did in fact give me a bit of a headache.

15

Some of them only seem to work if you move the image up and down or left to right. Or at least that’s what I found. The ones that work stationary are the coolest though.

16

Some of them only seem to work if you move the image up and down or left to right. Or at least that’s what I found. The ones that work stationary are the coolest though.

17

Wow, just wow. I had no idea that I have computers in my eyes!

That’s fascinating how, if the shadow wasn’t drawn “realistically” with the fuzzy edges but rather with a hard edge (imagine if you tried to draw this image but was limited to the EGA 16-color palette), your eyes would “know” that they weren’t looking at an actual shadow and the illusion would fail.

Another way to look at it - paste the image into a paint program (MSPaint will do) and simply invert the palette. Since the shadow is actually making the floor beneath it brighter rather than darker, your eyes “know” that they aren’t looking at a shadow, and as a result it’s very easy to spot that the A and B tiles use the same shade of grey.

18

They still look different to me when I do that.

19

They still look different to me when I do that.[/quote]

They do, but much like a normal optical illusion I can stare at it inverted and finally see it the right way. If you mentally block out the shape it helps.

I’ve distorted the image a lot and it still works suprisingly well with quite a few features removed.

20

I have to agree - no matter how much of the screen I cover up, I can’t make the A and B squares the same color. I can tell the letter B is a slightly lighter shade than the letter A, but I can’t make my brain believe A and B are the same colors.

What am I missing?