Before Twitter killed it off, Kevin Parry was a Vine star (who has since jumped ship to Instagram) known for his simplistic yet mind-blowing optical illusions. He’s since compiled a few of them into a longer video that will have you spending the rest of the day trying to figure out how he made each one.
Water can do some trippy things, man. If you take a glass of water and slide it in front of a pattern, the refraction of light in water basically screws with those patterns and makes it appear as something else entirely. The distortion is really crazy to see because black and white squares turn into alternating white…
Let’s play a game. Can you find the orange tabby cat that’s supposedly taking a nap on this pile of wood without going crazy? I say supposedly because for a good few minutes as I was looking for the cute little guy, I swore that the cat didn’t exist or that the cat has transformed into a block of wood or that the cat…
If it looks like a roof and it’s sloped downward like a roof, it should act like a damn roof and have stuff freaking slide off it, right? Not when it comes to Kokichi Sugihara’s “Impossible Rooftop.” Even if you place a ball on top of this model house’s roof, it won’t roll off. Instead, the ball will break physics,…
There’s an iPhone laying somewhere on this carpet. You have to stare really hard and probably scour every pixel of this picture and possibly stop blinking for at least four minutes in order to find it, but I promise you that it’s there. Jeya May Cruz dropped her iPhone onto this rug and basically saw her phone vanish…
I’m not blind, I can totally see that the square is moving. First, it tilts to the right side and then it tilts to the left side, like a seesaw of sorts. But it’s actually a mind-bending illusion that makes you think it’s moving.
What in the sorcerous hells is this? Kokichi Sugihara’s ‘Rectangles and Circles’ illusion is a mind-bending visual trip that turns squares into circles and circles into squares right in front of your face. Different shapes are placed at a mirror and what you see in front of you is totally different from what you see…
A few weeks back, you might have seen a video floating around of what appeared to be a Viner Kevin Parry playing catch with his own reflection. It’s hard to look away from, but it’s obviously impossible. That led commenters to speculate on how the trick was done.
For just shy of $300, Harlequin Illusions will sell you a seemingly magical red oak wine rack that always looks empty when viewed from the side, despite there obviously being bottles stored in it. But the secret behind this trick isn’t wormholes or holograms, it’s a magician’s most faithful assistant.
In every one of these side-by-sides from artist Howard Lee (and there are ten of them), one is the real object and the other is just a hyperrealistic drawing. Some of these drawings look so real that it’s hard to tell what’s art and what’s not. It’s especially great because after we get fooled, we get to see how the…
I want my cake to be fluffy and delicious and always enough for seconds. Maybe it can be a little decorative and fun and hide a joke somewhere but what I’m not prepared for is a cake to wreck my brain before it pads my stomach. Take a look at this optical illusion, color changing, shape shifting (it’s not shape…
It’s all about the perspective. Well, it’s also a little about how easily our eyes can be tricked. Here’s optical illusion expert BrussPup pulling the old perspective trick on us by making us think something is real when it’s not and making us believe something is fake when it’s actually the real object. It’s a fun…
I can only accept two reasons as for how this drawing of an egg—yes, a drawing—looks like it actually cracks as an artist continues drawing: our eyes are pitiful things that cannot be trusted at all or the artist is a magician. There is no in between. This is expert level artistry that is very likely sorcery at work.…
Some of these optical illusions from Quirkology are totally silly but there are others that are genuinely fun to do, especially to kids and/or drunk people. It’s like explaining how to perform magic tricks or also how to exploit the weakness that is the human eyeball.
Zach Mueller has mastered the art of cardistry and in doing so, probably destroyed the laws of gravity. The Fontaine cards he’s using seem to have a mind of their own with special rules that don’t apply to other objects on this planet. It’s not so much that his hands are controlling the card but the card is…
This YouTube channel proves the art of the parlor trick is alive and well. Brusspup has reeled in almost two million subscribers with optical illusion how-to’s and science experiments. Here are a few you can try this weekend.
You can do so much with just water and other liquids. Like glycerin can make bottles disappear, water can start fires, honey does a good job at real life slow motion, a glass of water can reverse arrow signs and so forth. Brusspup, the YouTube illusionist extraordinaire, shows us 10 fun things you can do with liquids…
It starts off a little cartoonish but then it quickly turns creepy and almost squeamish as the hand starts to legitimately look like it’s been sliced to expose the blood, guts, and bones. Luckily, for us and for Natalie Nakles, the artist who did this, it’s only the work of markers, pens, and clever camera angles.…
You really can’t trust your eyeballs. Watch as freerunners Jason Paul and Pasha Petkuns use illusions and perfect camera angles to screw with our perspectives as they slide down bananas, live in an upside down world, become giants and tiny humans, and do a lot more mind trippy stuff. It’s really fun.
Super photorealistic drawings are always fun to see because they tickle your brain into thinking things that you know are fake could possibly maybe be real because they just look so similar. Here’s a drawing from Dino Tomic showing a leaf drawing with a pile of other leaves. It’s hard to tell which one is fake!
