It’s universal, our delight with things optical illusion.

On 8 марта (March 8), International Women’s Day in Russia, these ladies performed a clever little optical illusion number to the delight of the entire audience. Click the photo to see the video.

As you can see, each costume is half black and half white.  The left half of one paired with the right half of its neighbor creates the illusion of whole solid-color people with extraordinary abilities of levitation.

It calls to mind a classic visual illusion routine I saw at the British Embassy in Washington, DC.

Here’s how it went. A  performer would come out and state something like, “I really wish I had become a dairy farmer” and he’d pantomime a gesture which a dairy farmer might do – like milking a cow – and then keep repeating the gesture. The next performer would come out, stand right beside the first, and express his own “I really wish I had become…” – like a professional baseball player – and repeat that mimed gesture loop. A third performer might wish to be a lingerie designer for plus-sized women. The thing was that the gestures next to each other started an hysterical slapstick chain of 8 performers – where cow milker just barely ducks the bat swinger whose completed swing temporarily becomes the pole on which an imaginary pair of plus-size panties are hung for display, etc., etc.  Great side-splitting fun!

Can someone out there can help me with a title of this routine or a video?

I’d just sit and watch the clock all day! I’m even fantasizing about flying to Dubai to do it. That’s where Stockholm-based designers Bastian Bischoff and Per Emanuelsson are exhibiting this utterly brilliant timepiece during Design Days Dubai 2013.

In 2011, Bischoff and Emanuelsson came up with their first optical illusion Clock Clock – “a clever and elegant grid of 24 analog clocks that work together to create one large ‘digital’ clock.”  Their latest creation, “A Million Times,” (above) uses 288 clocks together, and the result is even more ingenious and mesmerizing!  Are you as blown away as I am?

Thanks go out to a new fav Core77 poster “hipstomp/Rain Noe” for sharing this info with us.

For this woman (and I’m not alone) receiving chocolates and a dozen long stemmed red roses on Valentine’s Day is a total yawn.  So conventional.  No effort involved.  But some lucky gal’s guy (or guy’s gal or guy’s guy or gal’s gal) put real thought into speaking from the heart by creating the clever image below with simple stacks of blocks or Postits or whatever, strategic lighting and a camera.  Swooooon!

My apologies for not being able to cite the actual creator of this piece.

Ambivalent feelings this Valentine’s Day? Read the black letters then read the pink to see the opposite.

Ambigrams are extremely clever exercises in graphic design that play with optical illusions, symmetry and visual perception to create images which can be read more than one way.

The Love/Hate example above is by renowned typography artist John Langdon. John Langdon’s brilliant ambigrams have been favorites of mine for decades, ever since we met while exhibiting at Toy Fair in NYC. (Post 7/10/11). John designed the ambigrams for Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code series.  To know more about John Langdon, here’s his FB fan page and an engaging interview by Helen Walker.

Ambigrams usually fall into one of about a dozen categories including figure-ground (like Love/Hate above), rotational (above left), and mirror-image, 3-D cast shadow, and perceptual shift (all below). Ambigram generators are now available, but despite their “recent improvements” they fall so far short of the elegant ingenuity of John Langdon’s clever mind and hand they’re hardly worth a visit.

I’d love to see Langdon’s take on for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health!

Mirror-image           Three-dimensional      Perceptual shift  (Wave and Particle )

One of my favorite optical illusionists, Brusspup, is at it again with his latest anamorphic tricks. 
I understand he shoots photos of simple oblects like those in the photo below, skews the images in Photoshop, prints them, trims the paper, and positions the skewed photos so that, from an exact viewpoint, the image looks 3-D normal. Then Brusspup starts the video camera. As the trimmed photo is rotated on the table, you see his clever 3D-2D-3D optical trickery. Brusspup generously provided high res files of the Rubik’s cube, shoe, and tape to print on 8×11″ paper, trim, and play with.  Thanks, Brusspup!

Is it a mermaid surfacing out of sea foam? A frog peeking through bubble spawn? Barbie having a shampoo?

None of the above. It’s an optical illusion of an eye-shaped whirlpool, inadvertently captured by Reddit user Liammm.  “Out of boredom” in cooking class he had decided to take a picture of his sink draining.  “It was all just an accident that came from bugging a friend with my iPhone camera!”

The drain, some dirty dishwater and soap suds created such an incredible likeness he did a double take. He found a beautiful, eyeball peering back at him.  The swirling water in the sink created a perfect colored iris, the black drain the pupil and the foam the eyelids. One amazing photo, don’t you think?

This clever, healthy snack of apple slices, mini marshmallows, and peanut butter…

Courtesy of Toms River Dental Care

Please visit my blog every day in October to enjoy images of some rather ingenious skull carvings and drawings I collected over the past year. By Halloween you’ll be up to your own eye sockets in skulls!

Please visit my blog every day in October to enjoy images of some rather ingenious skull carvings and drawings I collected over the past year. By Halloween you’ll be up to your own eye sockets in skulls!