The orange and purple circles appear to be spinning in a counter-clockwise direction.

To see more motion illusions, be sure to check out the Beating Heart by Akiyoshi Kitaoka and the Moving Pink Square from Daniel Picon.

Today’s video arrived in my inbox courtesy of Masodo, a regular visitor to this site.  He runs a blog called BlogDogIt where he posts about a variety of things that he finds interesting.  The video features a dance routine by eight girls who use clever choreography and black & white costumes to create an ambiguous illusion.  As the routine goes on, it becomes difficult to distinguish which legs belong to which girl making their movement appear to be very odd.

If anyone has any information about who these girls are or where this dance was performed, please let us know in the comments.

In the early 20th century, psychologist Edgar Rubin developed the figure-ground vase (also known as Rubin’s vase).  This ambiguous figure can be interpreted as either a vase or two faces looking at each other.   Metal Portraits, a company based in Suwanee, Georgia, has taken the figure-ground vase concept to an entirely new level by creating metal sculptures that are the exact same size as your face.  They can be made from solid brass, stainless steel or aluminum.

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This figure, created by Peter Ulric Tse,  may be interpreted as a series of ‘pyramids’ on the ground plane (pointing upwards )or as the ‘teeth’ of a saw that face the viewer and lie flush with the ground plane.  Can you see both interpretations?  Which one did you see first?

A number of ambigrams from Michigan State University professor Punya Mishra have been featured on An Optical Illusion in the past.  I just discovered a short video that he created at the end of last year wishing everyone an outstanding 2013.  In the video, he uses a bit of anamorphic trickery to fool the viewers into seeing something that is flat as a three-dimensional object.  My only wish is that I had seen this video sooner!  Enjoy.

An impossible bottle is one that has an object (or objects) inside of it that is physically larger than the neck of the bottle.  The bottles are undamaged with everything inside of the bottle being inserted through the neck.  When viewing an impossible bottle, the only real question that you will find yourself asking is, “How exactly did they get THAT in there?”  These types of bottles have been around for a long time, but they were made popular by magician Herry Eng who passed away in 1996.   Below are a couple of examples of impossible bottles created Merlin Dunlop, operator of the Impossibottle.co.uk website.

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Maine recently announced that they were going to start selling instant scratch-off lottery tickets called “Kwikies”.  After sending a note to 1,300 retailers announcing this, complaints started flooding in about the name being inappropriate.  It now seems that the tickets will be called something else.  Interestingly enough, Maine used a topsy-turvy optical illusion to help advertise the launch of these new tickets.  The caption reads, “Change your life.  In an instant.”  Rotating the card 180 degrees turns a bald grumpy man with a beard into a younger man with a full head of a hair and a smile on his face.

To view more topsy-turvy faces like this one, be sure to revisit The Inverted Faces of Rex Whistler and Reversible Face (which was used in an advertisement for a different type of product).