Back in June we spotted a video that had us flummoxed: a few round-looking shapes appear as squares in a mirror. Rotating them 180 degrees produced the opposite result. Was it wizardry? CGI? Almost a month later, we finally have our answer.
Want to trip out your brain for a few minutes? Watch OK Go's new music video for their song "The Writing's on the Wall" and delight in what you can do with mirrors, paint, and objects in the proper position.
Take a peek at Deformscape, a garden patio in San Francisco. The architectural sculpture is a practical solution to limited space, and a vertigo-inducing illusion of a wormhole ready to suck the neighbourhood into the Japanese Maple tree.
Look at these grey circles. They look bent, right? Like somebody put a ring in a vice and squeezed it? Actually, it's just an incredible optical illusion courtesy of @SciencePorn. Both circles are perfectly round. Really. No really.
A lot of things can bother you while you're trying to work, but what about things that you only perceive as nagging? In Keyfleas, little lights follow your fingers around a keyboard like a swarm of fleas, and can create the sensation that something is nipping at your fingers.
It's disorienting to walk into a room where nothing is as it seems. Your doctor might be grimacing even though your test results are fine. Or everything might look normal in your house until you realize that there's a cable outage and your internet is down. But if everything were an optical illusion you would probably…
The best optical illusions are often the ones we happen upon unintentionally, which is exactly what happened when redditor Liammm decided that water circling the drain of his sink would make for a nice photographic subject.
At first glance, these brilliant photos might appear to be shaky images of a distant nebula, but that's just a clever illusion. Photographer Fabian Oefner actually created these images using fiberglass lamps, Photoshop, and a bit of ingenuity.
This optical illusion is a fairly simple one, but it's still a very impressive effect. A triangle and some cunningly positioned diagonal lines are all that's needed for your brain to tilt a perfect level rectangle completely off-kilter.
At first glance, this looks like a poster for Harry Potter, but is there something more going on? These posters illustrate famous stories with minimalist images, but hide a second story inside.
Apparently this take on the Rubin's vase illusion has been bouncing around for awhile, but it's a fun visual trick. And, as a commenter on CBR noted, "Wolverine or two Batmen" is plotline of The Prestige.
You've probably seen this optical illusion before, in which two lines of identical length appear to be different by adding opposite-facing arrows to them. It's a very powerful effect - so much so that it overwhelms all other visual information.
You know that amazing Halloween costume you've been crafting for the past month? I'm sorry you wasted all that time because this Pure Smoke illusion—that magically conjures up puffs of vapor from your bare hands—has easily got you beat.
Optical illusions just keep getting more extreme. We once examined an optical illusion in which a silhouetted figure spins in different directions depending on how you look at it. Here's the sequel, which is four times the optical illusion craziness.
Two tiles, seemingly different colors from one angle are actually the same color in different lighting. I don't get it at all. What's the trickery here? Is it the shadowplay? The lights? The tiles? I don't know.
The Motion Aftereffect is an optical illusion in which stationary objects appear to be in motion if a person has just been looking at a moving background. And the effect appears to work on the deepest levels of our subconscious.
Imagine that you woke up to discover you had somehow shrunk to a doll's size. Would you think you were tiny...or that everyone else was a giant? Some Swedish psychologists decided the world deserved an answer to that age-old question.
It's no David Copperfield, but in this day and age surely that's a good thing? Winner of the Best Illusion of the Year contest, this moving circle of dots tricks the eye into seeing changing color even when they're not.
Watching a real life version of Escher's Impossible Waterfall melts my brain. The more I look at, the more confused I get! Thankfully, the secret on how the whole illusion works is out. There's clear DIY instructions on how to make your own impossible waterfall on Instructables and that video above shows what's …
