Optical Illusion

UPDATE: Here's the latest on the optical illusion disaster waiting to happen: the "warning illusion" has been installed, and now you can now see it in action below. No car accidents have been reported yet, but it's only a matter of time... Unexpectedly, the illusion appears t ...more

You don't have to go the boring route with Christmas lights this year. Try hacking them, or better yet see if you can replicate this Tron-themed optical illusion made by WonderHowTo favorite Brusspup. Good luck... looks like it took some serious time and patience to get it rig ...more

Imagine this scenario: Late for work, you jump in the car. Going your usual 10 or maybe even 15 miles over the speed limit, suddenly a ball tumbles into the road, closely pursued by a little girl! Scared sh*tless, you slam on your brakes. Except it's not imaginary. It's real. ...more

Artist Felice Varini has been playing with the art of illusion since 1979. This piece takes on the incredible scale of an entire Swiss village.  From Core77: "In Cercle et suite d'éclats, Varini...superimposes perfect circles on the town of Vercorin in the Swiss Alps. From i ...more

Wow. Really fantastic fire illusion by WonderHowTo favorite, BrussPup. Hang in there, the magic starts to happen at 0:34. Previously, Jerry Andrus and His Impossible Box. Create Fake 3D Objects with Camera Illusions. Artist With Waaay Too Much Time and Money, Paints Pointless ...more

Optical Illusion Nails - Stripes or Checks ? Check out this surprisingly easy nail art design in this step by step how to tutorial and create one yourself ! - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg_7sEO2_pM Video: . For Nail art tutorials - http://www.youtube.com/user/SuperWowstyle ...more

The holiday season wouldn't be the same without decorations. Ornaments and fancy lighting brightens up a neighborhood and helps spread the holiday cheer. While decorations and Christmas lights are fantastic, why not get a little more creative and some fun in the process? One ...more

Heads up: the following videos and GIFs will definitely cause you to zone out and lose focus on whatever it is you're doing. Ouka is an award-winning Japanese entertainer whose made a name for himself with magic tricks and diabolo performances (the latter of which you can see ...more

Every year, some overly ambitious neighbor down the street amazes the crowds with his DIY illusion costume. While these costumes certainly require more work than pulling a mask over your head, they do have that wow factor that others lack. These costumes illicit lots of doubl ...more

Does size matter? When it comes to optical illusions, it does. The size of a human brain's visual cortex determines how he or she sees the world, meaning not everybody observes optical illusions in the same way. Via io9, Dr. D. Samuel Schwarzkopf, a researcher at University C ...more

This video is compilation of ten amazing optical illusions: Rooftop Illusion, Color Illusion, Motion Binding Illusion, Crazy Wire Illusion, Duck-Rabbit Illusion, Silver Egg Illusion, Anamorphic Illusion, Water Illusion, Animated Optical Illusion. Video: .

Here are 10 incredible optical illusions that will blow your mind! Which optical illusion do you think is the coolest? Video: .

My mind is playing tricks on me! Discover Magazine systematically dissects five fantastic optical illusions. The scientific explanations are logical: "our brains are programmed to see the world in three dimensions instead of two" ...or... "illusion arises when cells in the ...more

YouTube illusionist Brusspup has used everything from mirrors to fire to create his optical illusions, but his latest trick is a little more 2D. Using a printer, a transparency sheet and a piece of regular paper, he made several illusions that trick your brain into thinking th ...more

This is one more cool illusion by maricv84, one where you slide a transparent sheet with black bars overtop a cryptic image to create an animated effect. Video: . The links for the images used in the video are below. You can print them out and try it at home. Just make sure to ...more

Mimmo Rubino applies the art of brain melting to the streets with his perspective-distorting, optical illusion graffiti art. The coolest part is Mimmo includes links to Google Maps for some of the pieces, so you can go take a look for yourself (if you happen to be in the vicin ...more

And the magic is revealed ten seconds in! Disappointed? Me, too. Such a simple explanation. Those first 10 seconds were so convincing... Previously, Why Are Our Brains Fooled By Optical Illusions? Truly Impressive Fire Box Optical Illusion. Truly Insane Fire Animation. Get Min ...more

The Illusion Contest of the Year recently announced their top ten finalists, and the overwhelming crowd and jury favorite is Impossible Motion: Magnet-like Slopes by Koukichi Sugihara of the Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences in Japan. Ready? Brain- ...more

This video shows you how to construct a miniature Ames Room from a layout using paper. An Ames room is a distorted room that gives the optical illusion of depth, distance and varying size. Setups like this were used in 'The Lord of the Rings' movies. Video: .

It's time to trip out with your tablet. If you're not looking to drain that precious battery life with a fancy-looking live wallpaper, then apply an optical illusion that appears to be moving on your Nexus 7 (or any other Android device) instead. Many of these visual illusion ...more

With severed, angled gaps in three out of four legs, it looks like the work of a chainsaw-wielding maniac. But those gaps are clean cut and without blood, despite the redness of the slices, and definitely not the work of Leatherface. Peter Bristol's "cut chair" seems to defy ...more

We all love Tron. The more Tron the better. We learned how to make a Tron suit with the help of Adafruit, but here's a new rendition that substitutes the electroluminescent wire for LEDs. Instructables member sheetmetalalchemist says the LEDs are brighter, sturdier and lighter ...more

WonderHowTo favorite brusspup demonstrates an amazingly simple coin trick with a plastic hanger and a quarter. In fact, it seems almost too simple to be real. Scrounge for a hanger and quarter and try it yourself, then comment below. More from brusspup: Truly Impressive Fire ...more

Brusspup once again blows my mind (see previously below). His latest project is an extremely well executed animation, using a grid of tea candles to represent classic video games. How did he do it? Most likely simple stop motion techniques (light a candle, take a picture; li ...more

For some of you out there, today may be a looooong Friday. But have no fear, if you've yet to furtively accomplish shaving off a few extra minutes from the office clock, there is an alternative for getting through the day: computer pharmaceuticals. Relax, moms, we're not talki ...more

Let's take a look at the softer side of illusions! Check out the images below and see if you can crack what's really behind these photos. This type of optical illusion is usually referred to as an ambiguous image. Your brain tries to make quick sense out of the information com ...more

Andrew Lipson builds sculptures based off of Mathematical objects using standard Lego bricks. He has built models of knots, Mobius strips, Klein bottles, Tori, Hoberman spheres (using Lego technic pieces), and recreations of M.C. Escher works. Below are a few images and brief ...more

"Mind Your Step" is a gargantuan street illusion staged in Stockholm's most public square, Sergels torg. Created by artist Erik Johansson, the illusion will be up until June 12th, so swing by if you happen to be in Sweden. Erik has documented his entire creative process here, ...more

We've seen several examples of light graffiti on WonderHowTo (1, 2, 3), but this one is truly eerily beautiful. Australian photographer Denis Smith pushes the envelope with his project Ball of Light. "The Ball of Light is a mysterious portal into my world. It, and its friends ...more

LIGHTFAKTOR is a Cologne artists collective experimenting with the "possibilities yielded by bulb (long-term) exposure and painting." The technique employed has been coined "light writing" - Wikipedia's definition: "Light writing is an emerging form of stop motion animation ...more

The artwork for Minnesota's Land O' Lakes butter packaging is classic, dating back to 1928 when it was first created by Brown & Bigelow illustrator Arthur C. Hanson. The logo was updated ("modernized") once in 1939, again in the '50s, and has undergone minor modifications here ...more

Pioneered by Rufus Butler Seder in his popular children's picture book Gallop!, and ably demonstrated by WonderHowTo favorite brusspup in the video below, "scanimation" refers to a novel (but distinctly old-timey) technique for cramming multi-frame animations onto a single she ...more

Our brains do a magnificent amount of work to process visual stimuli, but they aren't difficult to fool. Optical illusions can trick our minds into believing what we're seeing is real, even if it's not—and virtual and mixed reality technologies take advantage of this little lo ...more

Creating a haunted house for Halloween was a big deal when I was growing up, and the neighborhood kids were always coming up with ways to try and out-do each other when it came to this frightful night. One beloved game was to blindfold the participants and play the Withered Co ...more