bored. so i explored the ebaum’s site for a bit and came across their illusions page. can someone tell me what is the illusion for this one? it’s merely wordplay isn’t it?
btw, this illusion is good. i did actually had to use photoshop to verify it.
I don’t get what you mean it having something to do with wordplay. Do you have the right link? Do you mean this one?
Watch it again, and then wait for the animation to take place. Once that happens you can come back and ask me how they do it.
Well, the two are obviously different colors.
:: checks in Photoshop ::
Huh…they’re the same.
But look at them, they’re obviously different!
But they’re not.
But they are.
But they’re not.
But they are.
But they’re not!
But they are!
But thBAM!
:: smoke rises from the crater where Hal’s cranium used to be ::
::coughs::
Hal?? Hal??
:eek:
If that makes your head blow then I wouldn’t try this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/body/interactives/senseschallenge/
You need sound to fully appreciate it.
That second one never fails to amaze me. It just doesn’t compute in my head.
oh, i had turned animations off.
my eyes! i see dead people!! … it’s something to do with the first guy… his hair got borrowed off and he didn’t get a replacement…
my reaction to the 2nd illusion is the same as Hal Briston’s. how can they be the same?
I think the people count illusion is cool. Looks like they’re all getting a little bit taller and shorter depending on whether there are 12 or 13.
If you have the second Illusion in your graphics editor, experiment with how much of the image you can delete and still ge the same Illusion. Even with just a thin vertical strip containing A and B you get the illusion (though to a lesser effect). This goes to show that what we see isn’t like a photographic measurement but an interpretation of data.
Insane!
They can’t be the same color… yet they are.
I can’t wrap my mind around this. I think I’ll go do some multivariable calculus instead.
I can’t find it but I remember there being a whole thread a whiiile ago on just that second illusion. Maybe someone else can find it?
Would someone please explain the people count one to me? I even printed it out and cut it up with scissors and I still don’t get it.
Haj
I was sure Cecil covered it, but obviously I was mistaken. Here’s a layman’s answer:
Check the height’s of every person before and after. You’ll notice every person gets a bit shorter because each person gives up a tiny bit to the extra man. If you look at the first person on the left you’ll see he has lost a hardly noticeable top part of his head. That head gets swapped with another person who loses just a bit more so it is still not noticable but more and more gets taken, which goes to a person who loses most of their head, to the shoulders, to the body, to the legs, until every person has given a unique section of their body to create a new person.
I hope that makes sense for you.
Whew, thanks '_tick! Now I can finally sleep at ni
Even though the checkerboard one didn’t seem like that much of a stumper to me… (of COURSE what we perceive has at least as much to do with context as raw sense perception - we’d probably all be quivering wrecks it we couldn’t function in this way,) I ended up downloading the free trial of paint shop pro so that I could measure color levels a little more precisely.
The results in a nutshell: the checkerboard is set up so that dark cells ‘reflect’ half as much of the light they receive as the light cells do. However, the shadow of the cylinder reduces the ambient light available to the checkerboard by 50%, with the result that the light cell in the middle of the shadow reflects exactly as much light as the dark cell well clear of the shadow, and thus they show up as the same tint in the picture. (by the way, I’m aware that this picture was almost certainly created with image manipulation, but I’m treating it as if it were a photograph because it’s easier to explain some things that way.)
Now, not only are we seeing one cell surrounded by lighter squares and the other surrounded by darker squares, but because we see the cylinder and the gradual pattern of darkness that it casts, I think our human brains are automatically ‘adjusting’ for the effect of the shadow, since many evolutionary millenia of behavioral evolution have taught us that a shadow does not really change the reality of the objects upon which it falls, merely their appearance.
In case anyone is interested in the details, both cells A and B register at a ‘light level’ of 107… (RGB components 107, 107, 107 out of the 0-255 scale - a nice neutral gray.) The dark cells inside the shadow show a light level of around 50, while the light cells outside of the shadow have a light level of 199.
This stuff is so cool. Always love optical illusions.