Optical Illusions of the Year
kottke.org
kottke.org
"It was made with rotated repeating tiles as a total and complete accident. I was making a gaming map!"
At least for me, my focus kept wondering around the room, never noticing that things that was previously there was replaced by something else.
Like the OP, I found the "changing room illusion" very powerful, because it showed me how shockingly unreliable my own visual system can be! Magicians do this to us on a regular basis.
Luckily for all of us, no one appears to be using these kinds of adversarial samples to fool us in dangerous situations, e.g., when we're driving vehicles on a fast highway.
If we would have a better understanding of our limitations we wouldn't lose 1.3 million people each year to road traffic deaths.
Personally, I absolutely agree with the OP that the 2nd place was most impressive here - the checkerboard "invisibility cloak" is convincing but not novel. The reveal was easy to predict. The changing room I was still amazed at after rewatching numerous times - I could start to notice a small number of things changing each time, but the overall scale of the change is still hard to believe.
Imagine reading a book in an artificially lit, climate-controlled room. If, over the course of hours, the lights gradually dim and the temperature rises, or the background noise increases, at some point you would become acutely aware of your discomfort. But you wouldn't be able to say how or when it came to be, or even if the situation had always been somewhat like this. What if the hue of the lights varied cyclically over the days of each month? Would you ever notice? There's fractal applicability to this, scaling so far as to the flux of culture of a civilization over many years.
It's very carefully calibrated. At 2x speed you see things change; at 0.5x you see them in transition.
The curtain change seems significant except that it's against a reflective window with items visible behind in darkness - that lends itself to vague/semi-transparent objects being "acceptable" to the eye within that space. The blue & yellow picture and rug are also blurry/vague patterns which lend themselves to fading in/out. The ceiling is dirty off-white, lending itself to tiles being off-colour at times. The books on the shelves the same. The only very "finite" objects in the scene (and by far the easiest to notice changing) are the wine bottles.
I watched it full screen at 34". I saw changes ghosting in where I was looking e.g. bottles appearing over the top of books.
I couldn't pay attention to the whole scene because there is just so much clutter so I didn't notice the curtain moving and such but I could tell other objects were greying in my peripheral vision though. I can't really call the experience as an illusion, just an example of how narrow my attention is of a complex scene.
Maybe if I wasn't looking at something so big, I wouldn't be concentrating on such small subsections of the scene.
A few times I've shown it to people and the response was "I don't get it. What's the same?" Because they can't believe that their initial reading of the description is correct!
> Expected Kokichi Sugihara to be represented as always, not disappointed. I will have to try and replicate this one as well.
I really don't see this one
What's cool about these is that they're tangible. And for some of the shapes, it works well even when looked at with two eyes (which supposedly should tell your brain the trick) and from not the perfect angle.