Is this a real perpetual motion machine?
Obviously not… The closest thing to a “perpetual motion machine” is the Beverly clock whose mechanism is driven by variations in atmospheric pressure, and by daily temperature variations.
Author: Gianni Sarcone
Ghost Colors
This is one of my earliest color optical illusions. There is no yellow or green in the diamond shapes, just vertical black lines! (If you don’t believe it, use a eyedropper tool to check it.) This intriguing visual effect is mainly due to “simultaneous color contrast induction“.
Illusive Color Radial Beams
“Deep Blue”, the yellowish rays you see in this picture are a construct of your brain. My op art work is available as prints from Saatchi Art gallery.
Color Luminance Sensibility
Do the light gray triangular shapes in the diagram below have the same hue and brightness?
Scintillating Starburst: Seeing rays that aren’t there…
This is one of my oldest illusions I created in the 90s. In the picture you may see ghostlike dark radial beams. This illusion is a variant of the Herman’s scintillating grid illusion. I designed this illusion just by turning 45 degrees the Herman grid and then by applying a polar transformation.
Dalí’s Living Skull
Salvador Dalí : Sept corps nus et un crâne, 1951 (Human skull consisting of seven naked women).
Often symbols of MORTALITY (or some romantic notion of immortality – as the belief that a spiritual part of a person survives death) and POWER, skulls have been employed in human rituals and art since the dawn of humanity: from the ancient animal skulls in Paleolithic burial sites, to the curlicued cattle skulls that haunt Georgia O’Keeffe’s canvasses. Skulls cannot be assumed to be only a mere symbol of death, they are also used in initiation rituals as a symbol of REBIRTH, symbolizing the ‘sephirah daath’ (סְפִירָה – sephirah, “enumeration” in Hebrew) on the cabalistic tree of life, the gateway to a higher awareness only achievable through spiritual death and rebirth.
Illusion of Color
Look at the colored rings from a distance. Then decide which ones have YELLOW inner circles, and which ones have BLUE inner circles.
Is Magenta a Real Color?
Most of us are familiar with magenta — it’s a kind of purplish-red that exists between blue and red on color wheels (color wheels don’t accurately represent the physics of photons, but they represent the philosophical reality: color is a human construct that helps us interpret wavelengths to better understand our world).
The odd thing about color vision is that magenta (or pink) color is not in the spectrum of colors, meaning it cannot be generated by a single wavelength of light. Our brains interpret the color sensation of magenta/pink as ‘absence’ of green.
Source: https://www.archimedes-lab.org/Gallery/new_optical_illusions/pages/10n-Pink_rose.html
My Op Art in PM Magazine
My optical art has been featured in the February issue of the German science magazine PM.
A simple real life illusion: the transparent knife!
Take a look at this photo — it almost looks like a “transparent” or “camouflaged” knife! I snapped it years ago at a magician’s party. The trick here is all about specular reflections. It’s a simple illusion, but surprisingly effective. When you place a knife blade between the tines of a fork, it reflects nearby objects, making the blade seem almost invisible.
