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
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
Happy weekend! Time to relax and waste time. If you're a child at heart, or you've got a couple young ones hanging around, treat them to these old-school magic tricks, courtesy of Flickr user Jordan Smith. Smith generously scanned and uploaded a selection of cards from a postc ...more
Watch this instructional origami video to fold an origami sailboat. This origami boat is folded and designed by Joost Langeveld. This instructor paints the origami paper to enhance the visual illusion. He holds the origami paper in front of several completed examples of the or ...more
Watch this instructional origami video on how to make an origami snowdrop, folded and designed by Joost Langeveld. The flower of this snowdrop plant should be folded from a triangular piece of paper. The snowdrop flowers in the background serve as ready inspiration for this ti ...more
This is quite the trick. By making a couple loose folds into a dollar bill, and a few strategic placements of paper clips, it's possible to link two paper clips together! This is just a magic trick that appears to magically link the two paper clips together, a mere illusion, b ...more
Paper Donut is a collaborative graffiti project between Justine Ricaud and Alexis Facca. The French duo paint geometrical illusions as urban art (with the exception of the gallery installation below). They've also posted some detail shots that give you some sense of how it was ...more
Learn some free magic tricks with Cameron. You can learn some of the worlds best magic tricks from Cameron Oelsen, an amateur magician who loves to share the tricks behind his tricks. Watch this video tutorial to learn how to perform a paper magic trick. Is it an illusion, sl ...more
Learn how to make a three dimensional city from a sheet of paper. Start with a flat drawing of a city scape and a sharp X-acto knife. Cut along each vertical line of each window. Cut along each horizontal line of each window. Be very precise and do not cut past the end of the ...more
OCR is usually a bad word to most computer users, but in Acrobat it's the next best thing to sliced bread. Adobe Acrobat 7 Professional not only employs Optical Character Recognition for your text, it does Page Recognition to preserve the geometry of your pages. Everything sta ...more
Draw it your self! with pen and paper, in the best style of M.C. Escher. Amazing three-dimensional impossible object. Takes only 2 minutes and produces this illusion object.
Sponge balls are a very cool magic effect. But you will have to master palming first. You will get very good reactions. The best part is that you can simply keep them in your pocket. Here is how to start. Palming Begin by pretending to put a ball in one hand while secretly k ...more
The stunt is not simple. FOLLOWING THIS IS A NO AIRPLANE VERSION, and you do not need to get your freinds drunk in the no airplane version you need to get them into the fake house and using the fake bathroom. etc. Real Airplane Version step 1 and 2 Step 1 Part 1 Rent a F ...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: .
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
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
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
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
It may be surprising, but those cardboard toilet paper tubes are dead useful for so many things besides just keeping the circular shape of your TP roll. As shown before, you can make car dash mounts for your mobile phone, but that's just one of the many beneficial uses from a ...more
"I'm Rey." That's what a lot of people will be saying again this Halloween, as Rey costumes are sure to be another favorite of trick-or-treaters and cosplayers. Yes, on Oct. 31 we all have a chance to be the scavenger of Jakku who just so happens to be the "new hope" for a Jed ...more
While there aren't as many ways to customize your iPhone like there is on Android, there are still a lot of apps out there that can help streamline and enhance your experience beyond Apple's own default options — and we've hand-picked over 100 essentials. No matter if you've ...more
In June at the eMerge Americas investors conference, Magic Leap founder (and NR50 member) Rony Abovitz proclaimed that the launch of their flagship product was "not far away." Nearly three months later, an eternity in the tech world, and we have not heard an official launch d ...more
Every industry has its own jargon, acronyms, initializations, and terminology that serve as shorthand to make communication more efficient among veteran members of that particular space. But while handy for insiders, those same terms can often create a learning curve for novic ...more
Researchers at Disney have demonstrated the ability to render virtual characters in augmented reality that are able interact autonomously with its surrounding physical environment. So imagine that you have a virtual porg placed on your living room floor. Based on the research ...more
This is a pretty cool little trick for your brain. If you stare at a negative image for a little, then switch it to black and white, it appears to be in color. Images can be downloaded here: http://s95.photobucket.com/albums/l13... This is a good way to trick your mind's eye ...more
What if I told you that you could read minds? You'd most likely think I was crazy, and you'd be right. But what I really meant is that you could make people think that you could read minds, something that's not the least bit crazy. Performing mind reading — and it is a perfor ...more
Grand Illusions is a site for the enquiring mind. This how to video demonstrates how to make Japanese origami tumblers. Your wonderful & charming host represents Grand Illusions, an amazing toy, magic & illusion web shop and gallery. Description from the amazing Grand Illusio ...more
Impress your friends and kill time while waiting for your band mates to tune their guitars by stick twirling. This technique uses a bit of optical illusions to make the twirl look cooler. Learn stick twirling. Click through to watch this video on unirunner.com
“Western Imports”, by artist Cayetano Ferrer, uses inkjet prints to create site-specific optical illusions in public spaces. "Ferrer uses existing forms in order to engage in a dialog about the constant flux of the built, contemporary environment. Using inkjet prints on exist ...more
We never thought this would happen. A cherry pie AND cupcake in one? We have officially died and gone to foodie heaven. Make sure you take a closer inspection of these cherry pie/cupcake hybrids, however: These are actually cupcakes decorated to resemble cherry pies using fros ...more
In arithmetic, the simplest expression is far preferred to the long eye-boggling one. Stop making your expressions painful optical illusions by watching this tutorial on how to write rational expressions in the lowest terms. By factoring and then canceling out like expression ...more
FarmVille hacks, cheats, glitches! FarmVille is the hottest application on Facebook from Zynga which lets members manage a virtual farm by planting, growing, and harvesting crops, trees, and livestock. Grow delicious fruits and vegetables and raise adorable animals on your ver ...more
Minecraft never ceases to amaze, from programmable pianos to serial killers. But now someone has tackled M. C. Escher's famous Relativity lithograph from 1953 that depicts a world not bound by the normal laws of gravity. It's an amazing puzzle of a three-dimensional world trap ...more
Learning how to draw is a very much about learning how to see. Watch this instructional drawing video to begin to draw the illusion of depth on a flat surface. Most people can see perfectly fine and understand the concept of depth in space. However, drawing becomes tricky when ...more
WonderHowTo is a how-to website made up of niche communities called Worlds, with topics ranging from Minecraft to science experiments to Scrabble and everything in-between. Check in every Wednesday evening for a roundup of user-run activities and how-to projects from the most ...more
Giveaway Tuesdays has officially ended! But don't sweat it, WonderHowTo has another World that's taken its place. Every Tuesday, Phone Snap! invites you to show off your cell phone photography skills. Submit your best shot to our weekly competition for a chance to win an awes ...more
Tomorrow's the 1st of April which means it's the one day of the year you can put aside the daily grind, and go at it Dwight Schrute and Jim Halpert style. Yes, there are easy apps to do your dirty work, but if you're old school and you like to do it the old fashioned way, here ...more
Whereas yesterday's segment of Making Art on Your iOS Device focused on the technical elements of drawing from life, today we enter the painterly realm of David Hockney and Jorge Colombo. The apps below can be categorized under "painting"—or more accurately, the digital creat ...more
Nowadays, a lot of desktop computer optical disc drives come equipped with a small pinhole emergency eject option, to help open a stuck CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive. This is a handy little option for getting CDs and DVDs out quickly, without shutting down your PC. All you need is a ...more
Sound waves are a lot more versatile than you'd think. For starters, you can use them to project images onto a bubble and liquefy gummy bears. And now, YouTube scientist and optical illusionist extraordinaire Brusspup shows how sound waves can also be used to manipulate a stre ...more
Most augmented reality experiences are purely visual, with spatial audio gaining in popularity to make visual experiences more realistic. However, leveraging the sense of touch may be the next frontier for AR experiences. This week, researchers at the School of Engineering an ...more
Safari has a convenient "Find" feature to search for specific words and phrases in a webpage, and Apple Books has a similar feature for e-books and PDFs. But those do nothing for you when searching text in the real world. Hardcover and paperback books are still very much a thi ...more
You may or may not care about this, but sometimes it physically upsets me when I see gears stuck together haphazardly, with no concern for whether their teeth interlock. I mean, what do you do with non-interlocking gears? So when I sat down to design a paper chain of gears, I ...more
Love taking photos with your smartphone, but don't have a zoom? This tutorial by Unitips will show you how to DIY one with a few simple parts. All you'll need is 1/4" bolts, washers, and wingnuts (two each), some sheet metal, and a pair of binoculars. Video: . The only difficu ...more
We are in a pretty major technology boom at the moment. One that will likely make the industrial revolution look tiny. And one of these technologies that are building up to lead the way is something called augmented reality. There is a chance you've heard the phrase thrown ar ...more
Karen Gillan must have had an absolute blast chewing the scenery as Nebula in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, seeing as how Nebula is a ball of pure, seething fury pretty much 24/7. Combine that larger-than-life personality with her iconic blue and silver cyborg look, and you ...more
You know Moana's a rock-solid pick for Halloween this year. The question is, how far will you go to become Moana? Are you going to just slap on a cream skirt and a red bandeau? Or do you want to go all out and end up with the finished product like YouTuber Gladzy Kei did? Alre ...more
Smartphone videos get better and better each year. Seven or eight years ago, who would have thought iPhone and Android phones could support 4K video recording. Some phones can even shoot slow-motion at 960 fps. But no matter the resolution or frame rate, a phone's rolling shut ...more
Eventually, even the most private company has to file its patents and unveil its tightly-held secrets, and Magic Leap is no exception. The US Patent and Trademark Office recently published a treasure trove of Magic Leap patent applications that appear to provide more details ...more
Among the revelations uncovered during the December unveiling of the Magic Leap One: Creator Edition was the fact that the Lightwear augmented reality headset would be tethered to a wearable computer called the Lightpack. Now, according to a recently-published patent applicat ...more
Puzzle games are great at giving your brain a workout while keeping things fun and killing time. They stimulate your noggin as you strategize and plan your next move, whether it's to keep your character from getting killed, or to get that special item to finally complete your ...more
The time to wait for an absolutely killer phone from Samsung is over. They've released a giant of a phone known as the S20 Ultra, and at least on paper, it's a grand slam. But only a few months ago, Apple released its first "Pro" iPhone, and it was giant in its own right. So w ...more
Researchers have created a possible replacement for traditional camera lenses, using an "optical phased array" to function as both a lens and sensor of a camera. The project from researchers at the California Institute of Technology is the first ever camera that works without ...more
As 2009 comes to a close, the Telegraph presents a compilation of this past year's wackiest inventions. As always, here at WonderHowTo, we are inspired and impressed by ingenuity. The contraptions below range from utter silliness (engagement ring bra) to downright amazing (see ...more
Every fall, we can expect a few things: leaves changing colors, cooler temperatures, and Samsung and Apple releasing new phones that fanboys and fangirls will argue about until the following year. This year, Samsung is mixing it up, releasing two phones in the Galaxy Note seri ...more
When it comes to technology, there are no bigger names than Google and Apple. They're the two most valuable companies in the world, and they've swapped places a few times over the last year, so they're truly neck-and-neck. But let's put business aside for a moment — which of t ...more
A deck of cards may be a magician's best way to demonstrate his or her's sleight of hand, but for the prankster, it's the perfect way to deliver a shocking 300 volts of electricity! And that's exactly what I'm going to show you how to do today. Stuart Edge used it in his "Elec ...more
We recently set out to find the best phones for people whose primary usage revolves around social media apps like Facebook and Instagram. Samsung, Apple, and Google were the three brands that made our top five, and while the latter only had one finalist, the two bigger OEMs ha ...more