6 Responses to “Optical Illusion of the Year”

1. #1 |  de stijl |  August 23rd, 2009 at 11:19 am

   I was so ready to declare shenanigans on you and say that the second picture is obviously different until I measured the margins to the tower and the angle of the tower. Fuck, that is freaky.

   Stupid brain, shut up or I’ll stab you with a Q-Tip!

2. #2 |  Tim C |  August 23rd, 2009 at 12:53 pm

   “Next, on World of the Pyschic – gimme Ira – hairless pets. Weird.”

3. #3 |  mark r |  August 23rd, 2009 at 2:29 pm

   if you really wanna freak yourself out…..

   put your fingers on each picture to line up against the edge of the tower like little backslashes. \ \

   your fingers will very obviously be parallel, the images will still appear to be on an intercept course.

   eerie.

4. #4 |  Tim C |  August 23rd, 2009 at 5:08 pm

   While we’re at it, this is my favorite illusion page:
   http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html

5. #5 |  jahigginbotham |  August 24th, 2009 at 12:09 am

   Do the floor tiles here (in this article on doctored images) do the same thing?

   http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/08/23/weekinreview/20090823_FAKE_SS_2.html

6. #6 |  db |  August 24th, 2009 at 8:50 pm

   I’m not sure I entirely buy the explanation (that the brain’s vision center considers the images as a part of a single scene, and because the towers are parallel, that the brain interprets their non convergence as a divergence).

   That may be the underlying reason, however, I think that the fact that the towers themselves appear to have converging sides due to perspective (and, probably, a wide-angle camera lens) is important. The right edge of the left tower and the left edge of the right tower are clearly not parallel, and that is a major contributor to the illusion.

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