Runner Up: Emergent City Flyby with Colossus (Christopher Tyler and David Phillips)
Human vision largely depends on seeing the edges of objects to discern their complete structure in 3D space, but motion parallax on its own (where closer objects appear to move faster than objects in the distance do) also provides a lot of useful clues to our visual system, as Christopher Tyler and David Phillips demonstrate. When paused, this video simply appears to be a pattern of mostly random white dots, but in motion, our brains instead see a sprawling city composed of endless buildings and a colossal head revealed floating in the night sky at the end.
