I was going into town on the highway, and it was windy out. All of a sudden, to my left I see this thing pulling on to the road. It was one of those crane trucks, and it was painted black. As soon as I saw it, I said “Holy Shit, it’s a Chinook (the helicopter)”. It really did look like a Chinook, I honestly thought there was this helicopter hovering three feet about the entrance to the high way.
The friend who was with me at the time has delighted in telling everyone this, so misery loves company, tell me about the thing you’ve mis identified
As a kid many was the night, half asleep I suddenly sat bolt upright in bed upon seeing “a man” in my closet who happened to be a jumble of shirts and belts.
I like “motion effects” OIs best. Straring at a waterfall for a while, then looking to the side and seeing the cliff walls move “up”.
The best of these was while visiting the Lake Washington ship canal locks in Seattle. There were some barges with Huge Loads on them destined for the Alaska oil fields. Once the barges started moving out of the locks, the Universe started playing tricks. My mind thought the big trailers and containers on the barges a few feet away were stationary and the Other Stuff was moving. Swirling head time.
Moral: Don’t automatically trust what your senses are telling you.
In front of a local museum there’s a black helicopter sticking about 20 feet off the gound, supported by a black pole. Every time I see it I always think it’s tangled in the telephone wires that are right in front of the 'copter since the pole is so hard to see.
My favorite (not really an optical illusion but an unorthodox perspective shift) is to think of the car I’m driving as stationary (minus the rolls and bumps and tilts from the uneven moving surface below it) as if the car-seat were a comfy couch, and the world as a big marble being rolled around by the moving wheels until I’ve rolled the piece of world I want to bring over to me into its desired position.
Two experiences come to mind.
I(t was dark, I was seventeen, I was waiting to turn left onto a busy street exiting a driveway. The busy street had a center divider, and was wide, so I was in the center divider area watching traffic whiz by the front bumper of my car. A second car pulled up on my left and stopped. He then realized that he had pulled too far forward, and traffic was too close for comfort.He put his car into reverse and started backing up very slowly. In my car due to the darkness all I can see is that it appears my car is moving forward into the traffic lane. I press harder on the brake, and it still looks like I am going into traffic. I slam the car into park, and it still looks like I am moving. At this point my rational brain takes over and I look out and down at the ground, sure enough I am not moving, he is backing up. Scared the hell out of me for about 10 seconds.
The second time was a bike tour I took a few years back. I crested a hill, and the road looked like a nice gentle downgrade. But for some silly reason I had to keep pedaling. I began to think my bike was broken, and the grade changed to where the road really did start to fall off and I could coast. Later that day I asked a couple of other riders about this and they all thought the same thing. I guess the way the fence and the house sat, it fooled the eye.
Funny you should ask Logitech because I keep seeing you as me. (For a split second I see a thread by you and think it’s by me)
Not the strangest optical illision I’ve ever seen. But deserves an honourable mention.
There’s a new car advert that uses classical illusions (3 rods from 2 forks, elephants with 4 legs and 5 feet, etc) to great effect.
I didn’t actually see this myself; my sister did. She was driving and I was in the passenger’s seat. There were two ladies walking on the road a ways ahead of us, and from my sister’s point of view, it looked like the two ladies were carrying a road sign.
I’ve had the opposite happen. I was braking down a steep incline and reached what I thought was the bottom, so I let off my brakes only to start going again. The slope apparently went like this:
/\
/ \
/ \
/ \
/ \ <---- where I stopped braking
\
\
the two of us would ride by ourselves (in our joint position as staff member/(smirk, sputter) noble steed for a riding group). one particular day, as we were coming down a long pathway through the woods, the main group of riders was heading towards us on the same path. the topography of the land was slightly undulating between the two points. so even though we’re looking down the clear pathway, on what (in our heads) appears to be rather level ground, what we’re seeing is other horses and riders that are head-height above us, heading straight our way. and i know it wasn’t just me that got disconcerted, because my horse (who happily spooks at anything noteworthy) absolutely froze up at the sight, and had to be practically beaten before he would move hoof one forward from that spot. the peculiar part of the whole deal was, the only time this optical illusion seemed to come into play was when someone else was on the path at that particular point – when we were by ourselves, nothing ever seemed out of the ordinary at all.
In my bedroom, I have a fan on the floor. On the medium setting, its frequency apparently matches that of the TV’s flicker exactly. If all other lights are off and the TV is the only thing illuminating the room, the fan appears not to be moving.
I don’t know if you’d call it “strange”, but it is a neat effect.
Yea, like Rick said, the ones that get my heart pounding are the car/truck/bus next to me slowly creeping and me thinking my car is moving. Happens all the time and I seem to always fall for it.
The strangest illusion that I have experienced happened during a Boy Scout canoe trip. We were canoeing upstream in a fairly large river and we came across some plastic milk jugs that for some reason had been fixed in the middle of the river like buoys (I suppose maybe it was to mark a shoal or something). The combination of the water flowing downstream around the stationary milk jugs as we passed in our canoes going upstream was just so completely bizarre to me (so bizarre I can hardly describe how unearthly it felt), it actually made me feel “funny”. Then again, maybe it was helped by a mild case of heat exhaustion after a long hot humid and sunny day sitting in a silver canoe. (One of the adults took his shoes off despite warnings to the contrary and ended up with the worst case of sunburn I’ve ever seen!)
The first and only time I went mountain biking, We were going down a hill, but it was shallow enough that you could coast without feeling like you were accelerating, so I intuitively thought it was flat. Then there was a U-turn, going into another hill, which was also pretty shallow, but since my mind had tilted everything, it looked ridiculously steep. But only to me. That was a pretty awkward moment.
I like doing the motion thing (where you convince yourself that what’s moving is still and vice versa) at the baggage claim at the airport. Then there’s also the one where you put your fingers really close to one eye, close the other eye, then make it look like you’re pinching people’s heads. Or treating a chain-link fence as an imageless stereogram
Same thing happened to us about 20 years ago. Apparently we weren’t the only ones who thought so either, people were driving off the road, looking up at the thing.
I once stood at a urinal on a tile wall, where the tiles were spaced in such a way that my eyes had no way to tell how far away they were. The image of a tile in my left eye exactly matched the image of a tile in my right eye, making it impossible to visually tell how far away the wall was until I stepped back.
I’ve seen this happen with horizontal ropes as well, if the twist of the rope is just right.
There’s a local civic center that has a pathway running in front of it through a grassy lawn. Somehow, because of a slight rise and dip of the ground level, you cannot tell there’s a pathway from the main door. I don’t just mean you can’t see it, I mean you cannot see any visible clue that there’s pavement. It looks like a flat unbroken expanse of lawn all the way down to the street.
One evening my Dad and I stopped at a Wendy’s for dinner. The setting sun was behind me as we sat down and was glaring up the windows to our left but I could still see out. We’d started eating when I looked out and saw what looked like glowing golden orbs flying along outside. At first I thought it was the reflection of lights from a couple semis on the road behind me but I knew the angle just wasn’t right. For about two seconds I actually believed the orbs must be UFO’s. As they passed behind the Wendy’s I suddenly realized they were sea gulls and their white feathers were catching the setting sun’s rays.
Just then, my Dad said, “It looks like you’re seeing a UFO.”
Thank god I didn’t say anything though.
