Best Illusion of the Year Contest - 2019 Finalists | Hacker News Reader

Best Illusion of the Year Contest - 2019 Finalists

illusionoftheyear.com

248 pointslisper38 comments

Site loading extremely slow due to load but thankfully the content is just hosted on YouTube:

1st: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC0GGkNZPgs

Kokichi Sugihara didn't reach quite the top this year with his "Facing-Right Illusion", but he has won multiple years with variations of this concept. Cool that it gets refined each year.

I have calculated some of the shapes myself and a few unique ones. They can be seen here: https://www.thingiverse.com/Matsemann/collections/matsemanns...

I think it's pretty cool, but I'm sure what exactly the illusion is supposed to be? I mean, it's an actually symmetrical shape so after rotating 180° it seems rather obvious that we see the exact same thing as before, no?

One would normally think that rotating it would create the same shape, but pointing the other way. My arrow here maybe makes it a bit more clear: https://github.com/Matsemann/impossible-objects

I actually much prefer your arrow to the example in the linked article! The lighting of the bird shows its somewhat weird shape very clearly and pretty much gives away the illusion, at least to me.

The ‘Chunder Thunder’ is a variation of the ‘Perpetual diamond’ which demonstrates the illusion more economically and IMO captivatingly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20103642

The ‘diamond’ was published almost exactly one year ago. However, images exploiting the same effect were circulating much earlier (beware, strobe fest ahead): https://i.imgur.com/4oZyQFx.gif, https://i.imgur.com/2eDISOQ.gif

Btw, I previously tried watching these gifs frame-by-frame, flipping them manually, and the effect still persisted for me.

What are some interesting applications of optical illusions?

For example, perspective illusions can be used to trick drivers into slowing down: https://www.insider.com/optical-illusions-3d-crosswalk-drivi... or crashing: https://imgur.com/a/kYr94

But I rarely see any of the crazier optical illusion effects used. Maybe these don't affect the population in a consistent enough way to use as a feature? (based on how white/gold and black/blue split the internet)

Well, what would you use them for? Any suggestions?

A lot of illusions work so well we don't even consider them illusions anymore. For example movies are just flashing pictures. Pictures/monitors/cameras themselves only need to capture 3 colors instead of the full spectrum (if we were mantis shrimps we would need 12!).

I guess I was hoping there would be some HNer with specific expertise who can talk about how these tricks are applied in graphics. For example there was some buzz a few years back on how a company managed to trick the brain into seeing the color black in AR (which shouldn't be physically possible without blocking light).

Interesting application is the whole branch of neuroscience and psychology researching about our sense of perception.

Magic tricks. Augmented reality. But we stop calling these "illusions" as soon as they have other applications. Pepper ghosts is an illusion that has been used by magicians for at least 2 centuries, but when Gorillaz or virtual idols use it on stage, we call it "holograms" or something.

Anamorphic deformations are called projection mapping nowadays.

Hmm, the second prize illusion, red/green versus yellow dots didn't work for me. I was never able to see the yellow dots. I have normal vision (no color blindness).

Try bluring your vision or moving further away from your screen.

Try following a region on one of the lines moving strictly horizontally to the right with relaxed vision (not focusing precisely). Choosing a point close to the top of the lines should be easier.

Thanks, that worked, thus it was more of a "blinking yellow led" kind of thing, not rock solid like the red/green aspect.

Another technique for tuning into the perception of horizontal motion: Use your hands or forearms to block your view of most of the picture, leaving only a narrow horizontal slit. For me the effect persists upon expanding my view to the full picture again. To 'switch back', look at a thin vertical strip of the picture for a moment.

As soon as I manage to see the motion as left-to-right, the dots look yellow — though the impression is really close to flickering between red and green. How readily your visual system will merge individual strobes into a coherent, moving visual impression depends a lot on how awake/alert you are at the moment. So you could also try again when you're more tired. Another thing to try: Change the playback speed to 2x. Though I'm not sure if that will increase the frame rate to 60Hz or skip frames. In this case you want the former; it may be necessary to download the video and play it back locally to achieve that.

By the way, I once managed to produce a similar illusion completely by accident: I had made an engine for rendering totalistic 2D cellular automata (a superset of Conway's Game of Life) that randomised the state-transition rules upon a keypress. After a while of browsing random rules, I found one with a tendency to produce neat tiny gliders: A sequence of three distinct colours (and therefore states, I thought) racing across the screen — something like a cyan dot trailing a purple one behind it, with a pink one sandwiched between them. But then I looked closer and saw that the pattern was only two cells wide. Taking a screen-shot and looking at the freeze-frame confirmed that the gliders only occupied two neighboring cells, with two different colours, at any given point in time.

At around the 0:15 mark, two overlays come on screen, creating an open column in the middle and two horizontal channels at the top left and bottom right. I noticed that I was seeing both options: yellow lines moving horizontally across the top left, turning into downward-moving red and green, then transforming again to yellow as they "turned the corner" at the bottom channel.

I wonder if those horizontal spaces will help you see the yellow.

It is much easier to see if you do not fullscreen it. Keep it relatively small, and if you still don't see them, unfocus your eyes just a little bit. Good luck!

Try and lock onto a dot as you track your eye from left to right. And then to undo that, lock onto a dot as you track downwards. That's how I managed to switch between red/green and yellow dots.

Works best for me following along the top edge

This is what worked for me.

I saw the up/down initially, but now I can only see the sort-of-yellow left-right unless I close my right eye. The vision in my right eye is vastly more blurry than my left (thanks kerataconus!) and I suspect the blending of the red/green is more pronounced for that eye.

It may depend on the screen tech you’re using. It relies on persistence of vision to merge the red and green dots into yellow when tracking horizontally, but it wouldn’t work on too big or too small a screen, and might not work on pentile displays.

Can someone help explain third place? I guess I could maybe see the white dot stretch into a line (triangle was the most obvious with two diagonals and a straight line), but it was barely perceivable.

I suffer from motion sickness (back seats of cars, most FPS games) and this one had a negative effect on my head and stomach.

The third is ‘The Rotating Circles’? You're supposed to look at the white dot, but the behavior of the small black circle in the middle will be changing, when in fact it does the same thing all the time.

Ah. Once I started taking in the whole picture that made more sense. Thank you for the help. :)

There’s no explanation in the video but there is some blurb underneath.

The second one was slightly disappointing in that I didn't really see the yellow dots, but rather a flashing red/green. I'm assuming each color was on the screen just a bit too long to blend into yellow for me.

Still, the changing direction motion was great.

It took a while for me, it's similar to those 'hidden images in noise' in that you have to somehow 'switch' your eyes to see a certain way. For me anyway, it's possible it just doesn't work for everyone.

Hmm weird... my senses didn't get fooled at all by the illusions in rotating circles, right facing illusion, magic tic tac toe, or ambiguous cardboard arrows.

For the other ones, it took supreme effort to see past the illusion.

>The Necker Cube, published by Louis Necker in 1932, ushered in an almost 200-year investigation into visual illusion. This video continues that exploration today in-light-of what we now know about the fact that matter equals energy. The quantum physics revolution has altered our world in ways beyond compare. What we see in our day to day experience is quite different from what science has confirmed. This video asserts that we must question our assumptions about perspective. The Renaissance helped us understand how we see 3-D distance visually, and today’s science confirms that there is more to the story.

This should win an award for the greatest pile of random words masquerading as information.

What the hell does the first sentence even mean? How could an event in 1932 usher in a 200 year investigation - predicting something that ends in 2132?

Louis Necker died in 1861, so it's supposed to say 1832.

OK, that accounts for the first sentence. But the rest?

> This video continues that exploration today in-light-of what we now know about the fact that matter equals energy.

Huh? I see nothing about interconversion of matter and energy here. At most, some excited electrons and biochemical changes.

> The quantum physics revolution has altered our world in ways beyond compare. What we see in our day to day experience is quite different from what science has confirmed.

No quantum effects here either. Except in the sense that protein biochemistry and biophysics implicitly involve them.

> This video asserts that we must question our assumptions about perspective.

This one makes sense.

> The Renaissance helped us understand how we see 3-D distance visually, and today’s science confirms that there is more to the story.

I guess. Except that Aristarchus of Samos understood parallax in the second century BC.

> ... the greatest pile of random words masquerading as information.

You may have just inadvertently won the 2019 HN tagline contest.

This is literally keyword stuffing for intellectually impaired.

I've worked at companies with mission statements that could give this a run for it's money.

Why isn't the US economy a runner up?

We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments and ignoring our requests to stop.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com