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Comment by fyp | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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

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).

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