Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Scientific American: The Winners of the 2014 Best Illusion of the Year Contest

The First Prize winner of the contest, an illusion by Christopher Blair, Gideon Caplovitz and Ryan Mruczek from University of Nevada Reno, took the classical Ebbinghaus illusion, where the perceived size of a central circle varies with the size of surrounding circles, and put it on steroids by making it into an ever-changing dynamic display. Blair rhymed his 5-minute presentation Dr. Seuss-style.



Second Prize went to Mark Vergeer, Stuart Anstis and Rob van Lier from the University of Leuven, UC San Diego and Radboud University Nijmegen, for showing that a single colored image can produce several different color perceptions depending on the position of black outlines over the image.



Third Prize went to Kimberley Orsten and James Pomerantz from Rice University. Their illusion consists of three images, of which two match and one is a mismatch. Viewers see one of the matching images as odd, and mistakenly perceive the other two as identical.

4 comments:

Shouting Thomas said...

I am struggling to overcome illusions!

Icepick said...

Freeman bait.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

MICHAEL: So, this is the magic trick, huh?

G.O.B.: "Illusion," Michael. A "trick" is something a whore does for money . . . or cocaine.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

The best illusion of the contest was not allowed in because the judges deemed it too controversial ;-)