Third Prize: The Double Ring Illusion (Dawei Bai and Brent Strickland)
Dawei Bai and Brent Strickland claimed third place in this year’s contest with an illusion that demonstrates how our brain’s understanding of the world works can affect how our eyes perceive things. When two spinning rings are positioned side by side but not touching, both rings appear to endlessly spin in 360° rotations. But when the rings overlap, the motions instead appear to be 180° rotations that bounce back and forth, as our brains assume the rings are solid objects that can never pass through each other.
