Have you ever wondered how Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson made Frodo Baggins the hobbit so much smaller than Gandalf the wizard? Aside from using CGI and child body doubles, the filmmaking team also employed brilliant forced perspective techniques that tricked viewers with optical illusions.
World travel bloggers Michael Powell and Jürgen Horn recently visited the The Trick Eye Museum in South Korea, where visitors can snap humorous and mind-bending pictures of themselves interacting with various painted rooms.
Dutch photographers Anuschka Blommers and Niels Schumm shot a series of photographs for a Dove ad campaign that uses the Thatcher effect for some stealthy creepiness. The effect is created by flipping a portrait upside down while keeping the eyes and/or mouth right side up. The human brain has a difficult time detecting these subtle "local" changes, and the portraits may look normal until you see them flipped. Try turning your monitor or head to look at these images upside down.
If you ever create a slideshow of portraits, you might want to avoid showing them aligned side-by-side with a gap in between. The video above shows a crazy optical illusion that researchers have dubbed the "Flashed Face Distortion Effect". By flashing ordinary portraits aligned at the eyes, the human brain begins to compare and exaggerate the differences, causing the faces to seem hideous and ogre-like. Researcher Matthew Thompson writes,
Like many interesting scientific discoveries, this one was an accident. Sean Murphy, an undergraduate student, was working alone in the lab on a set of faces for one of his experiments. He aligned a set of faces at the eyes and started to skim through them. After a few seconds, he noticed that some of the faces began to appear highly deformed and grotesque. He looked at the especially ugly faces individually, but each of them appeared normal or even attractive.
When recording video, a camera’s frame rate can produce some pretty strange effects. If matched up with a helicopter’s …
Here’s something that’ll blow your mind (sorry that it’s an ad): stare at the colored dots on this girl’s …
Photographer Zander Olsen creates amazing optical illusions by wrapping trees with white linen, lining up the ends of the material with the horizon line in the background.
'Moneyface' is a photo fad involving folded money and hybrid faces. Simply fold a banknote containing a portrait in half and combine it with a human subject.
Cell phone cameras have pretty poor image quality when compared with point-and-shoot cameras due to their small sensors, but …
We’ve shared a couple stories in the past month on how human eyes are very subjective and …
Here's a mind-bending video in which someone created the famous checker shadow illusion in real life. The optical illusion takes advantage of the way our brains process lighting and shadows.
As with many so-called illusions, this effect really demonstrates the success rather than the failure of the visual system. The visual system is not very good at being a physical light meter, but that is not its purpose. The important task is to break the image information down into meaningful components, and thereby perceive the nature of the objects in view. [#]
Interesting huh? Our eyes aren't very good as a light meters, since they're easily deceived by context.