You will notice that a grey stripe is moving somewhat randomly up and down in the orange section of the animation below. If you stare at the black dot in the lower right corner, you will notice that the grey stripe in your peripheral vision will turn blue. The effect of this illusion is very […]
Swiss artist Sandro Del-Prete is a master at painting beautifully-impossible scenes. As a young man, he attended the Florence Academy of Art. While in Florence, he began to discover and appreciate the works of Old Masters such as da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt. Today, his works have been featured in exhibitions in Switzerland, Japan, and […]
Rusty Rust frequently creates deceptive paintings that have a hidden element to them. Here, he paints a young boy on a horse on what we can assume is a boring day on the farm. As his mind wanders, he slowly begins to daydream. As he does, an opening in the dilapidated barn begins to resemble […]
Marin County-based photographer Jerry Downs captured the following photograph of two cows standing near each other in Idaho. In the dimly-lit photograph, it appears that the two cows share the same body with a head at each end. In trying to figure out which legs belong to each animal, I am reminded of the strange […]
On Tuesday’s episode of NBC’s show America’s Got Talent, a performer named Special Head wowed the audience by levitating in mid air. During his preparation for the stunt, a bored Howard Stern gave him his sign of disapproval by buzzing him and giving him an ‘X’. The other three judges held back and let him […]
This illusion concerns apparent rotation generated by pure translation. Square patterns consisting of four segments appear to rotate when they move straightly at a constant speed across the grid background. More surprisingly, the rotations in opposite directions can be generated by exactly the same square patterns. This illusion might be explained by the well-known inchworm […]
This stereogram is a little different than others that have been featured on An Optical Illusion in the past. Previously, the images have mostly contained an image that is hidden in a random and repeating pattern. This type of stereogram is called an object array. If you stare at the six bottles in this […]
