Impossible worlds (inc. staircases), Optical Illusions

Twisted stairs

 

Here are some crazy stairs.  Look at the stairs leading up to the balcony, and at the foot of the stairs you’re looking down on them from above, whilst up by the balcony you’re looking up at them from below. Nothing wrong with that, in a perspective view, but these steps are in a parallel projection, which forbids it. As a result, the side of the steps that’s furthest from us, next to the outer wall down at ground level, has somehow twisted to become the side that’s nearest to the viewer up by the balcony, and vice versa.  There’s a different twist to the stairs at the foot of the image.  On those, if you start, say, on the right, you’ll find that the flat step surfaces have become vertical risers once you’ve passed the half way mark.

Update May 2012! There’s also a later version of this scene.  I wanted to give it another go, because these stairs do have an extra twist to them …..

 

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Ambiguous images, illusions and aesthetics, Optical Illusions

Puzzling artistic effects

 I wrote in an earlier post about how effective decorative motifs can be if they are ambiguous visually or in some other way a bit of a challenge for perception.  Why that should be is a mystery, but here’s another of my favourite examples, decoration from a pot made in Corinth, Greece, about 595 BCE.

The pot’s in the British Museum and I guess it’s about 70 cms high.  Here’s (nearly) the whole thing.

What’s unusual about this decoration is the way the rosettes and other little decorative motifs in between the animals have expanded to fill almost all the space.  In earlier Corinthian decoration, they were much smaller, just little motifs floating in the pale space round the animals.  Over two or three decades, painters made them fill more and more of the space, until they left only an outline round each animal. I reckon that shows up better in a version of the first picture which I’ve played around with, and reversed so that the pale outlines are dark.

What’s perceptually puzzling about that, I reckon, is that the brain can’t quite decide whether, in this reversed version, these are animals with strong, dark outlines on a pale background, or pale animals silhouetted on a dark background.  If you like doing your own paintings, it’s a brilliant effect to play with, and works just as well with modern motifs, human figures, cars, aeroplanes, umbrellas, you name it.

Soap bubble pictures

Taking bubble pictures

Here’s a picture to introduce a post about how I take photos of soap bubbles. OK, I admit I didn’t snap this one out of an aeroplane window. I also admit that Photoshop had something to do with it, and I’ll get to that in later Photoshop posts. But the bubbles start out as real bubble photos, and if you wonder how, read on below.  (If you’d just like some bubble pictures for your own site, there are two you can link to on our page of link thumbnails, and I’ll be adding many more later.  There’s an earlier post too, with another bubble picture. Or if you need easy presents for someone, why not browse some fun bubble image and illusion stuff to buy.)

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Geometric illusions, Optical Illusions

Competing illusions

 

Here’s a rather subtle effect. It’s a competition underway, when the Zollner illusion is seen embedded in a staircase. In the staircase lower left, where two of the long lines are either side of the outside edge of a step (in other words like lines a and b here, on the sides of a convex step), the lines seem to get further apart with distance, as they would in a normal presentation of the Zollner illusion. But wherever on that lower left stair the lines are like b and c here, either side of the inner edge of a step, (so on a concave step), they tend to look much more parallel. In a normal version of the illusion, as below, the equivalent long lines appear to get closer together to the right.

Want to know more?

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Photoshop CS3 drawing tips

Making illusion images with Photoshop CS3

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Here’s a paradoxical image to introduce the subject of drawing illusions in Photoshop CS3.  The two arrows are objectively aligned, and if you try to ignore the folding screen shape in between, they look to me not so far off that.  But now look at the short segments of the folding screen that they line up with. Those segments are also aligned, but concentrate on them and they look so far out of alignment to me, I have to keep checking I haven’t got the figure wrong!  It’s a turbo variant of the Poggendorff illusion.

I like to draw my figures in Photoshop CS3, because I’ve already got it, and it’s on many people’s machines if I’m on the move. But it’s not designed primarily for that sort of drawing, especially of geometric shapes, like the ones in the illusion above, so it’s not always ideal. However, I can always find a way of doing what I want, so here is the first of a series of posts, with hints about things I found tricky at first. However, as you’ve surely discovered, there are often lots of ways of doing the same thing in CS3. I’m no Photoshop expert, and if you know a better way, please leave a comment.

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Geometric illusions, Optical Illusions, The Poggendorff Illusion

The Poggendorff Illusion and depth processing

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One of the most obstinately puzzling illusions is Poggendorff’s, in which a slanting line interrupted by a gap no longer looks aligned. For over a century specialists have been unable even to agree whether it arises from 2D properties of the image, or as a result of attempts by the brain to interpret the configuration as 3D. Papers written a hundred years ago treat the problem in very much the same terms as we do today. I’m betting on 2D (I argue for that on another, website devoted to the Poggendorff illusion). It’s not likely my speculations are spot on, and they may well not even be in the right direction. But read on here if you’d like to see demonstrations that show why I don’t think depth processing can be the answer.

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Geometric illusions, Optical Illusions, Size-constancy effects

Paradoxical Size Constancy

Size constancy is the term for our tendency to see distant objects as larger than they are. So the far end of a shape with parallel sides looks wider than the near end. (See the earlier post on The Wonky Window). It seems to be such a basic feature of vision that it can give rise to amazing effects.  In the photo, first note note that the “sculpture” is impossible! All four blocks are receding from us, so they could only connect up in real space as a bendy snake. Instead they join up in an impossible, ever-receding, endless loop.  (See the earlier post on M.C.Escher’s Waterfall for how that kind of impossible figure works). Here the endless loop leads to a paradox, thanks to size constancy. The distant end of each block seems wider than the near end, and yet at the same time seems to be exactly the same size as the apparently smaller, near end of the next block. Measure the sides of the blocks and you’ll find them parallel. It’s one of many demonstrations that perceptual space is not always geometrically consistent, (or it can be non-Euclidean, as the specialists put it).

 

I located my impossible sculpture in a deeply receding space because that makes the effect just a bit stronger.

Update January 2010: How could I have overlooked this?  The stripes I’ve added to these blocks will be enhancing the effect of divergence by adding the chevron illusion to the size-constancy effect.  The chevron illusion was first reported 500 years ago, by French writer Montaigne, as related in Jaques Ninio’s book on illusions, page 15.  The chevron effect is a special case of the illusion later re-discovered a bit over a century ago as the Zollner illusion.  Some specialists would say both effects depend on the brain’s attempts to make sense of figures as shapes in space.  I suspect that’s true of the size-constancy effect, but that the chevron effect is 2D, pattern driven.  That seems supported by the observation that whilst in the picture above the chevron and size-constancy effects are acting in consort, they can also oppose one another, reducing the effect of divergence.

Read on for more on size-constancy.

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Ambiguous images, Optical Illusions

An Ambiguous Skull-Mask Illusion

Is this a picture of a mask looking at a skull it’s holding up for inspection, or vice versa?

I got the idea from a print by Picasso, Young man with mask of a bull, faun and profile of a woman. There’s a copy in the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, and you can see it by calling up,

http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/simple_search

search for Picasso, scroll down the results and you’ll find it!

Illusions and visual special effects – explanations and tutorials