3d kaleidoscope

Below is a 3d kaleidoscope from Tekhna3d.com it is part of their experimental net3d model. There are many other interactive 3d demos to checkout on their site. Some you just move the mouse and others clicking the left mouse button moves you through the landscape.

This item requires that you have Macromedias Flash to run it. If the kaleidoscope is giving you problems, center the image then point your mouse over the image and press the right mouse button, now select restart.


If the kaleidoscope is giving you problems, center the image then point your mouse over the image and press the right mouse button, now select restart.

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Size Distortion Illusion

This is a unique view of a classic size distortion illusion. Looking at the illusion art below which crystal is larger the one in the center of the top left circle or the crystal in the center of the lower right circle? Each is surrounded by 6 other crystals. At first glance it appears that the crystal in the center of the top left circle is the larger of the two....

...truth is though they are the exact same size.

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Fractal Illusion

Picture this on your office or dorm wall. I found this on an all poster site. They sell this in a 3'x5' size. I think my brain might seize if I had this in my face all of the time. But you might be more resilient than I.

Click picture to purchase.

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Zodiac Illusion Art

Below is a series of paintings based on the Astrological signs of the Zodiac. This series is quite fascinating and very well done. However, as well as they are done I was not able to locate or identify the original artist of this series. If anyone knows who did this series please let me know.

What makes this series even more amazing and qualifies it as an illusion is that each is painted on a human canvas. These are all body paintings that are done so well that some of the paintings may take you a second or third look to figure out where the zodiac symbol was painted.

Click any image to enlarge

Update: Thank you to Rebel Angel for giving me a clue about the artist that did these pictures. The above series was done by Rudi Everts, an Australian Photo Artist. His web site http://www.rudiphoto.com apparently hasn't been up for at least a year. If anyone comes across a new web presence for this artist please let me know.

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Another Cyber Illusion

I found this on the internet with a very crude saying on it. It turns out that you can go here and put anything you want on the sign and for a fee have it turned into a refrigerator magnet. Just another reminder that just because you see or read it in cyberspace doesn't mean it's true.

They also have a wide selection of real church signs for your amusement.

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Sketching 101

Click on the image below, flash is required. It'll take a while before you really notice what's going on, but a woman is being drawn, from the inside out.

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Illusion Knitting

Apparently there is a style of knitting that knits illusions into a sweater or scarf. If viewed from one angle you see one pattern, if viewed from another angle you see something different. Over at Heidi's Knitting Room I found the below.

ILLUSION KNITTING - ... It results in a fabric that has vertical stripes and as you turn it sideways, the pattern that you have knitted in will appear while the stripes seem to disappear - until you turn it again!

When you look at the sweater from the front, you see red and white vertical stripes and a shadow of what appear to be white hearts, but as you turn it sideways, you'll see a solid white background with red hearts. It's really amazing, I had never seen this before! Here is how it works:

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Nuns on the Town

These photos have been making the e-mail rounds. Since I had to do a double take I thought they would be appropriate for this blog.

I don't have any info on the origin of these photos and Google didn't help this time. If anyone knows the story behind these photos please leave a comment.

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7 Horses

If you came here looking for the answer to "Pintos" a painting by Bev Doolittle of horses in the snow click here.

This painting is by Jim Warren. It is an illusion of a different type. One the most enjoyable paper activities I did as a kid was the hidden picture puzzles. Find the seven horses in this picture and relive a little part of your childhood.


Click on the picture to find the answers on the artist's site.
While your there take a look around it is well worth the visit.

The artist had this to say about this painting

As a kid, I always enjoyed those drawings in activity books with the faces and animals hidden in it. But they were often too easy, even for your average half-witted 10 year old such as myself. So I painted "Seven Horses", where each horse is a little harder than the next to find, until the seventh, which is almost impossible unless you're Einstein, who is not alive. So if you find six, here is a hint for the seventh:

You didn't think I would quote his hint, did you?

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Missing Hole Triangle

Here is another illusion. I have seen it presented as a puzzle or math problem but commonsense tells us that this must be an illusion. The only thing we have to do is try and explain the illusion.

Click on the Picture for the explanation

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Auditory Illusion

They bore into your head. They won't let go. There's no known cure. Earworms can attack almost anyone at almost any time.



No, it's not an invasion of jungle insects. It's worse. Earworms are those songs, jingles, and tunes that get stuck inside your head. You're almost certain to know the feeling, according to marketing professor James J. Kellaris, PhD, of the University of Cincinnati.



What do you think do these qualify as illusions? There is no music, no song that anyone else can hear, but they persist in our heads sometimes for hours or days.



Nearly 98% of people have had songs stuck in their head, Kellaris reported at the recent meeting of the Society for Consumer Psychology. The 559 students -- at an average age of 23 -- had lots of trouble with the Chili's "Baby Back Ribs" Jingle and with the Baha Men song "Who Let the Dogs Out." But Kellaris found that most often, each person tends to be haunted by their own demon tunes. Read the rest on WebMD. Also check out Exploratorium, The Science of Music.

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Illusion of Peace

This picture presents the world as one harmonious whole. This might give those that see it without any previous context the illusion that the world is at peace and there is no conflict only dreams as the world sleeps during the night.

Click on the picture to get a detailed image. Also check out some of the trivia below.


Click Picture to enlarge.
Earth at Night
Credit: C. Mayhew & R. Simmon (NASA/GSFC), NOAA/ NGDC, DMSP Digital Archive
Can you find your town?

The Freeman Institute had these observation about this photo.

Some things to notice about the earth at night:

1. Check out the development of Israel compared to the rest of the Arab countries.
2. Moving East, most striking is the difference between North and South Korea. Truly unique! Note the density of Japan.
3. Look how far upstream the Nile River stays brightly lit (and it's contrast to the area around it.) After the Nile, the lights don't come on again until Johannesburg.
4. You can see the train lines in Siberian Russia because the cities are all built on the rail lines -- the Trans-Siberian Rail Route.
5. There still is NO development at the mouth of the Amazon (unlike the Nile and other major rivers.)
6. You could call South America, Africa, and Australia "dark continents" because almost all of their development is on their coasts. Look at the Australian Outback.
7. Yugoslavia is one of the only dark spots in all of Europe. In east Europe, there is a high population concentration along the Mediterranean Coast. It's easy to spot London, Paris, Stockholm and Rome and Naples.
8. The "spine" of Italy is completely black.
9. In the Midwest US (everything north of Texas) the city lights form a nice "grid" of dots all lined up. This grid pattern was established as a result of the General Land Survey, initiated following the Louisiana Purchase to map the newly acquired lands west of the Mississippi. The GLS is based on a large scale grid of Principal Meridians (north - south) and Base Lines (east - west). These grids were then subdivided into 36 square mile Townships (6 miles square, containing 36 sections of one square mile or 640 acres each). Each Township had a designated school section. Roads tended to be located on the boundaries between sections, thus forming a grid one mile by one mile. Major roads, and subsequently railroads, tended to be located on Township lines, forming a larger grid. This tended to impose a distance of about 6 miles between towns, which has endured to this day. Many Townships saw the development of towns (and subsequently, cities), often at intersections of major roads along township boundaries.
10.Note that Canada's population is almost exclusively along the U.S. border.

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Restroom Illusion

If you had too much time on your hands and you wanted to create an illusion what illusion would you create? Well if you were Kevin Kelm the Crown Prince of too Much Spare Time you might create the Robodump V1.0

RoboDump is a robot. Sort of. And it poops. Sort of. Forever. A horrible, never-ending bowel movement complete with straining grunts, horrific gas, splashes, and pee sounds.



The left channel speaker points up into the room (for the voice effects) and the right channel speaker points down into the toilet (for the business-end effects).

I snuck RoboDump into the men's room at the office. Unfortunately, today turned out to be the day of a board meeting. Whoops! It still went over well; the office was abuzz all morning with gossip about the guy in the bathroom. Several people theorized it was the CFO. The janitor commented to someone in the hallway that he wanted to clean the restroom but "this guy's been in there all morning."

I also decided to dress it in businessware to make coworkers less likely to try to talk to it... if it looks like a customer or visiting bigwig, they'll be less likely to offer help or ask for a courtesy flush.

If you want to listen audio portion of this illusion go to his site.

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Church Railing Optical Illusion

Robert Jacobson a student at Southern Adventist University in Tennessee passed this church every time he would transit to the local grocery store.

On more than one occasion he thought to himself that the illusion he noticed from the road was fascinating and one of these days he should take a picture of these church railings and share them with others. On this day he remembered.

A moment of brilliance struck me today when I was getting ready to go to the grocery store. "Bring your digital camera!" I thought to myself. Every time I pass this church sign I tell myself, "One of these days you gotta take a picture of those stairs."

This is the approximate view you see as you crest the hill and first see the stairs. Robert explains why the picture isn't taken from exactly the position you first see it from.

I wish I could have taken the picture from the very crest in question, but I would have had to stand right in the middle of the road, and there were a lot of cars. There were safety concerns.

From this angle they look a little cockeyed, nothing amazing, they just go off in different directions. So what is so special about these rails? He further states.

But WAIT! Are they really crooked? Your vehicle descends the crest and moves swiftly past the front of the building. You look up quickly from changing the radio dial to 90.5 WSMC just in time to get another look at those handrails:

Whoaaaa! This was a surprise. I didn't expect to look up and see that these two rails were parallel. I'm sure examples like this can be found all around us. Thanks Robert for allowing me to use your images on this page. Go to his page and read his full take on this illusion including his take on explaining this phenomenon.

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Anamorphic Art of Kelly M. Houle

Kelly M. Houle creates some amazing art. Below is a portrait of Walt Disney. It is easy to see the Disney characters in this art but where is the portrait? To see this you must use a cylindrical mirror.

The image is laid down flat and the mirror is positioned. The below photograph clearly shows the portrait of Walt Disney seen in the mirror. This a very interesting technique you can read "How Cylindrical Mirror Anamorphosis Works" on this page.

Go to her site and check out the array of art that she has created.

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Chessboard Cube

I found this on Hans Kuiper 's Math Art page. I didn't really understand what I was looking at but it was very cool. I continued to poke around the site further and came across the next image. He explains this image in an article first published in the magazine Arthesis, July 2002.

Is it possible to create a piece of Art, which looks, seen from 6 different views, like a chessboard, using only 64 cubes?

That is what I asked myself, having visited a Minimal Art Exhibition in the Gemeente Museum in The Hague, seeing work from Sol LeWitt, an artist of the Minimal Art movement. I read about LeWitt, that in his vision, the idea behind the art work is much more important then the construction of Art itself.
But in my thoughts I saw my Chessboard "Cube" right in the middle of a roudabout, on the crossing of two regtangular ways. On your way to the roundabout you see in front of you the view of the Chessboard, while driving on the roundabout, you experience the anamorphosis, an optical illusion, because the position of each cube to the other cubes changes permanently. Leaving the roundabout you see in your rear-view mirror again the chessboard, independently if you leave at 1/4, 1/2 or 3/4 of the full circle. Read the whole article here.

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Bubblybabs Optical Illusion

I found this on BubblyBabs FractalFairy's personal art album at FE Users Art Gallery.

In this illusion the apparent orifice in the center expands and contracts as
you move your head closer to the image and pull back from the image.

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