A few weeks back the site got a load of US visitors from a link from a discussion on Reddit.  Someone got caught out illegally downloading at college, and as a punishment had to produce a poster about the evils of pirating.  The poster was to be inspected by the authorities and if approved, prominently displayed.  So the reluctant poster artist put out a query:  how can you do a poster that seems to say one thing, but when you look again says something very different. Whatever your take on piracy, (there is a vigorous exchange on the reddit site), the poster problem is an interesting one.  I mean, any of us might need to do a subversive poster someday.  Someone responded that pixelation might be a way to do it, and linked to our pixelation post.

I reckon that would in practice be a really hard way to do it.  Maybe a better way would be by using word combinations that are figure/ground ambiguous, like the Truth/Lies combination shown.  It would still be mighty risky though, if your effort was to be inspected, because it’s hard to tweak the ambiguity just so, leaving the subversive message hidden – but not invisible.  I tried a couple of tweaks above, trying to get a balanced result at top, to push out Truth in the middle, and Lies below.  I haven’t managed to get the recessive message hidden enough yet – not if my freedom depended on it – but maybe you can do better.

Note added at August 3rd 2o11! I’ve come up with a tweaked version of this word pair.  (Scroll down to the bottom of the link).

There are some clever examples of this kind of ambiguity on John Langdon’s site.

One of our most popular images seems to be the 80 illusions poster.  For everyone wanting a giant version, there’s been one available 35 x 23 inches, on our selling site at www.cafepress.com/optoct.  I was pleased with the quality of the printing when I got one.  Because of the interest, we’ve now reformatted the layout for a smaller version available on the same Cafepress site, 16 x 20 inches.  Both versions have discreet identification under each illusion, so that they can be followed up on this or other sites.  They include little known or novel versions of many famous illusions – and one or two illusions that we think are new.

I was in a Picasso show recently and noticed the head of a portrait sculpture apparently turning to follow me as I walked past.  More on the Picasso later, the movie above is my reconstruction of the effect, using the head of the emperor Augustus (I think).  It’s not done by animation.  You can set up a static image of your own head at home, and it will apparently turn to follow you as you walk past, not just with the eyes, but with the whole face.  Just imagine what a comfort that could be for your partner – to have your head always keeping an eye on things whenever you can’t be home yourself.

All you need is to print out a photo of yourself, between a three quarter and a full face view, and then fasten it into a concave shape.  I made my concave shape out of a cheap food container, made of some kind of not too hard polymer, so that I could cut it.  As you can see below, I just added a little convex wing at one edge, so that the shape is not all concave, but a bit serpentine.  When I fixed the trimmed photo in the shape, that makes the face concave, but the ear convex.  I reckon the effect works better overall like that, but you might get better results with a bit of experiment.

The real life version will work best if you view it with only one eye as you pass by, or see it from a distance.  That’s because to see the illusion your brain has to overcome the cues telling it the photo is concave, so that you see the face the way the brain insists all faces ought to be, convex.  But then the perspective transformation of the image as you move past is all wrong for a convex shape, and the face only makes sense if seen as rotating.  The effect is related to the Ames Window, and the hollow face illusion.  There’s also a really good YouTube demo using a dragon head.  (Actually, I’ve only just discovered that, and it’s better than my demo, but don’t tell anyone).

I think Picasso may have been the first person to discover this effect, in 1954.

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You’re going to have to hurry, but if you can get to the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro, England, before July 3rd, you can see this brilliant sculpture of a dog by British sculptor David Kemp, in his exhibition The Botallack Hoard.  It’s one of the dogs in his piece The Hounds of Geevor, and if you don’t make the show, you can see them anytime in bronze in the centre of the nearby town of Redruth.  Truro and Redruth are in Cornwall, which if you look at a map of England is the pointy bit in the bottom left hand corner.  David lives pretty much as far down the bottom corner as you can go, and I think he’s one of the very best sculptors anywhere working, amongst other interests, on ambiguous images, on which I’ve posted several times before.  He works with every kind of what some people might call junk, but he discovers in it ideas that I find very funny and very beautiful.  If you’d like more information on David Kemp, see his brilliant website.

Here’s another of David’s sculptures, of three musicians, along with more detail of one of them.

This is a detail from British artist William Hogarth‘s print made in 1754, to demonstrate mistakes in perspective.  For example, the sheep lower left get larger with distance, not smaller, and the woman top right is leaning out of a window offering a light to a man in the distance.

However I’m really showing it because a brilliant new animated demo of perspective anomaly, by Kouchiki Sugihara, has just won the first prize in the international Best Illusion of the Year Contest.  Don’t miss it, the ten best entries are shown, and there is some brilliant new stuff.

Coming back to Hogarth, his print was way before its time.  It was over a hundred years later, late in the nineteenth century, that illusion and puzzle picture books became common.  Then artists took up the challenge, Magritte and Escher for example.

Want to see the whole of Hogarth’s print?

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Here is a new animation in our series of animated illusion cartoons, Waiting for Shining Person.  (As with our earlier cartoons, It may run jerkily on first run-through.  It should be fine thereafter.)

Compression for Flash has slightly reduced the effect. If possible, view Waiting for Shining Person as a
Quicktime Movie

These cartoons are meant to work just like a three- or four-frame cartoon in a newspaper – each one presents a situation that ends with a punch-line.  The cast of characters are all illusion figures of different kinds, but each cartoon depends on a particular illusion effect.

So the cartoons are a new art form – but I’m not sure they’re entirely successful.

The main illusion to watch out for in the movie is the glare effect, which radiates from the face of the mysterious Shining Person:

I’ve been wanting to do a new version of my earlier post of The Twisted Stairs.  That’s partly because the way I placed the figures in the original posting, they got in a bit the way of seeing the twist in the lateral flights of stairs. I reckon you can see the twist effect better now, as they transform from stairs seen from below (at the top by the balcony), to stairs seen from above (down at floor level). I wanted to see if I could get it right, because this is an impossible stair effect that maestro M.C.Escher never used. Sometimes his staircases as a whole can be seen either as from above or from below, but they don’t twist from one viewpoint to the other half way up. As I mentioned in the earlier post, I reckon that’s because the twist effect depends on fudging the perspective, and Escher didn’t do fudge. His perspective is almost always miraculously lucid.

Another reason for a new version is that I wanted to produce a high resolution version, suitable for giant 35 x 23 inch posters. As ever, you are welcome to use downloads of the image here for any private purposes, but if you wanted to think about buying a framed print, or giant poster, here’s where to take a look.

There are more technical details on the original post. I borrowed the figures for this new version from Durer, Pieter Brueghel the elder, and Hogarth.

Woops, slight technical glitch with the original post of this, just before Christmas. So this is a re-posting of the third of our animated illusion cartoons, Chicken and Leaf. It may still run jerkily on first run through, should be OK second time around.

These cartoons are meant to work just like movie versions of a three- or four-frame cartoon in a newspaper – each one presents a situation that ends with a punch-line.  The cast of characters are all illusion figures of different kinds, but each cartoon depends on a particular illusion effect.

The main illusion effects to watch out for in this movie are tessellations, and especially the final transformation, which transforms across the image at the same time as it transforms locally:

You can also view Chicken and Leaf as a
Quicktime Movie

You can also see our this cartoon along with the previous ones in our Animated Illusion Cartoon category.

I’m fascinated by the effect that the movie ends with – a tessellation that transforms in space and in time. Tessellation (or tiling) wizard M.C.Escher was brilliant at these transforming patterns, as in his Metamorphosis prints, but of course couldn’t do animations.  I’m sure he’d have done the animations if he could, but without a computer they’d have taken years. In my animation there are two sequences of transformations, first where the pattern morphs in sync all over the screen – a number of people have done those – and then the one that morphs across the image as well as in time.  I’m not aware anyone else has done one of those.  Please let me know if so, I’d love to see it – and otherwise, I hope if you’re an animator you’ll be provoked into doing a better one than mine.

Eyespots are fascinating. Nature presents all sorts of camouflage and mimicry, but mostly when prey species look like harmful species, or are camouflaged against background, or imitate leaves, or when seahorses look like seaweed (sea dragons). The imitation then is in 3D, like a waxwork. But eyespots are nature’s only example of patterning that becomes a picture. Eyes in real life tend to be quite rounded and beady or bulging, but butterfly eyespots are flat. Yet they can be amazingly convincing, like the ones at the top of this picture of a peacock butterfly, complete with illusionistic highlights.

And apparently birds really are deceived by the eyes.  A study five years ago by Adrian Vallin and colleagues at Stockholm University demonstrated that butterflies with eyespots covered up really are much more likely to be eaten.  Apparently, the Peacock butterfly tends to rest with wings folded, looking a bit like old leaves, but when threatened suddenly spreads its wings to reveal this alarming mask.  It even makes a noise as well.

But when you look at lots of eyespots it gets more puzzling.  For example, the eyespots that are top in this picture look very realistic, but then the ones lower down are a bit of a mess.  Generally, looking through pictures of lots of eyespots, there’s the same spectrum from very illusionistic to very approximate.  Do they all work in the same way?  And then, the most illusionistic eyespots of all are maybe the ones on the underneath of the wings of the owl butterfly.  But birds only see those when the butterfly has its wings folded, so that only one eyespot is visible.  (Or does the owl butterfly lie on its back with its wings open when it’s depressed?).

So when the birds are frightened by eyespots, are they just responding to a stimulus on the retina that’s a bit like the pattern of stimulus from real eyes, so that even appoximate eyespots will do?  If so, why have some eyespots evolved to be so illusionistic?  Maybe the messy spots, like the ones lower down my photo, are transitional forms.  But if the illusionistic eyespots, complete with highlights, are more effective, can we then say that the birds are being deceived by pictures?  I don’t think there’s another example of a non human unequivocally understanding a picture. Reflections in a mirror, yes.  That was established amongst others by by Frans de Waal of the Yerkes primate research centre in Atlanta. But not pictures. Sure, there’s the the story from ancient Greece, of the contest between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius, when the painter Xeuxis painted grapes that were so realistic the birds swooped down to try to eat them? But I don’t believe it. I don’t think animals and birds do understand pictures.

Except maybe of eyespots.

Update January 7th 2010!  Turns out I’m wrong about animals – dogs anyway – and pictures!  Read on for the details.

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Here are a couple more variants of the Poggendorff illusion (mog, or moggy, by the way, is a term of endearment for a cat in UK English, but I’m not sure it’ll be familiar if your background is in American English). The symmetry axes of the dog and cat heads are objectively aligned, but to my eye appear displaced in much the way that the (objectively aligned) test line appears to be in classic versions of the illusion (as in pale blue, to the left).

I’ve added the blobs to the dog version, and the pigeons to the cat figure, because I have the impression that they make the illusion a little stronger. However, I haven’t tested that experimentally with these figures.  It’s also interesting to try deleting the images progressively, to see how much can be deleted before the illusion vanishes. Maybe there are conventional Poggendorff figure elements embedded in these figures in a way I haven’t realised.

For example, it’s well established that the illusion can arise when the usual line elements are reduced just to dots, (the dot version that might apply here is Stanley Coren’s – scroll down that link to view it). It would be possible to selectively erase the figures here until just dots were left. But reduced to dots the illusion is very weak, and here it looks quite robust to me.

I think it is the symmetry axes that are taking the place of the usual test lines here.  For me, that makes it that much more likely that the illusion arises because of two dimensional pattern elements.  (However, many specialists don’t agree, and attribute the illusion to attempts by the brain to interpret Poggendorff figures as arrays of lines in depth).

I have a special interest in this illusion, and you’ll find stacks more on it by clicking on the Poggendorff illusion category, in the categories list to the right.  I have ideas about what I think might be going on – but actually, I don’t rate them all that highly. Sometimes in science, when a problem resists progress for a very long time, (over a century in the case of this illusion), so that there are all sorts of ingenious competing explanations, it’s a sign that something is going on that nobody’s even begun to imagine.  I think that could well be the case with Poggendorff.