Perspective. pic.twitter.com/k53zRHbg9Y

— IM🍑HIM (@ziyatong) May 6, 2017

Ziya Tong, producer and host of The Daily Planet on Discovery Canada, tweeted a gif that clearly shows how the same two colors can look either black and blue or yellow and white. Read the rest

Spinning things with contrasting stripes are evidently mesmerising. Read the rest

I could watch this all day.

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These vintage cards and old placards display optical illusions, visual witticisms, hidden images, rebuses, and artistic paradoxes from yesteryear. They were the equivalent of Gifs back then — eye candy worth sharing. Here they are gathered in a oversized paperback for your entertainment and amazement.

The Playful Eye: An Album of Visual Delight by Julian Rothenstein, Mel Gooding Chronicle Books 2000, 112 pages, 9.9 x 0.5 x 12.7 inches, Paperback $9 Buy on Amazon

See sample pages from this book at Wink. Read the rest

I found this on reddit. There's no link to the source. The OP said it was part of a campaign "to promote pet adoption." Read the rest

Humans aren't the only animals affected by trippy optical illusions, as Ryan Kotzin (aka TheRealSquirrelWhisperer) demonstrates. It's interested to see his cat's eyes move around the page as the effect appears elsewhere.

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M.C. Escher: Adventures in Perception (1971) is a 20-minute Dutch documentary about the artist and includes scenes of him working in his studio. From Open Culture:

Obsessed with perspective, geometry, and pattern (Escher described tessellation as “a real mania to which I have become addicted”), his images have, by the count of mathematician and Escher scholar Doris Schattschneider, led so far to eleven separate strands of mathematical and scientific research.

The twenty-minute Adventures in Perception, originally commissioned by the Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs, offers in its first half a meditation on the mesmerizing, often impossible world Escher had created with his art to date. Its second half captures Escher in the last years of his life, still at work in his Laren, North Holland studio. It even shows him printing one of the three titular serpents, threaded through a set of elaborately interlocking circles, of his very last print Snakes. He never actually finished Snakes, whose patterns would have continued on to the effect of infinity, and even says here of his officially complete works that none succeed, “because it’s the dream I tried for that can’t be realized.”

(via Neatorama)

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This picture has NO red pixels. Great demo of color constancy (ht Akiyoshi Kitaoka) pic.twitter.com/pZHvbB6QHE

— Matt Lieberman (@social_brains) February 27, 2017

My daughter send this photo to me. I put it in Photoshop to check. The "reddest" part I could find using the eyedropper had an RGB value of 153/181/182. So technically there is some red in the image, but here is what 153/181/182 looks like:

Not very red! Read the rest

Richard Wiseman, author of 101 Bets You Will Always Win, made a fun video of seven different illusions. Read the rest

The guy in the cap doesn't get it, but the smart bald guy in glasses knows how it works. From the Bell Science Series film, "Gateways to the Mind" (1958).

Watch the full film (complete with nostalgically warbly soundtrack): Read the rest

Oscar Hudson directed this delightful music video for Bonobo's song "No Reason," described as "a film about staying indoors." Read the rest

There are twelve black dots in this image. Why can't you see all twelve at the same time?

I replaced the black dots with red dots, and it is easier to see them all at once. Read the rest

Peter Kogler projects or applies patterns to the surfaces of rooms that can be quite disorienting for anyone who enters. Most of his work uses warped black and white lines to distort the size and shape of floors, walls, and ceilings.

He also makes a lot of cool creations involving images of mice and ants.

• Peter Kogler site (via Colossal) Read the rest

Once you see it you can't unsee it pic.twitter.com/5mREeJUhYV

— bree (@msbreeezyyy) October 25, 2016

It took me a while to figure out what the deal is with this photo. I thought at first someone coated their thighs in oil. But then I saw it for what it really was. It reminds me of a Necker cube, only for legs. Read the rest

wxs.ca/iso/ presents a simple "isometric" field of cubes, Q*Bert-style. Click and drag across it and the cubes will rise and fall in series of waves. They also start to flash wild colors... or do they? Yes, they do! Read the rest

On Reddit, folks are wondering why these photos of piles of blue powder look like they are 3D. Some don't see the effect, but I do. Read the rest

Reality shatter. The two objects are traveling in exactly the same manner. Watch when it turns gray. pic.twitter.com/HpZsudeXSG

— Cliff Pickover (@pickover) June 18, 2016

Clifford Pickover says, "Reality shatter. The two objects are traveling in exactly the same manner. Watch when it turns gray."

And this:

Reality distortion. The orange dot that doesn’t actually change size. pic.twitter.com/7oMUtjYFhZ

— Cliff Pickover (@pickover) June 17, 2016

[via] Read the rest