Look carefully at the saw-tooth wave patterns on this picture. Is the background of the picture uniformly gray or are there different shades of gray?
Brightness constancy makes some vertical strips look darker, when in fact the gray background is all the same shade of gray.
This op art work is available as prints and canvases from my official online Gallery.
A math-magic article I wrote for the German magazine Zeit Wissen: with the 13 triangular and square pieces (fig. 1) it is possible to form two large squares shown in fig. 2. Though the second large square has an extra piece the dimensions of the squares seem to be the same! Can you explain why this is possible?
Here’s a wooden version of the puzzle I designed in the late 1990s. Each set of pieces is made in a different color, giving the puzzle a clean, elegant look while making its deceptive geometry even more striking.
I am looking for a game manufacturer able to produce and distribute this incredible puzzle. You can contact me through my website.
☞ Further reading: explore the complete Vanishing Piece Puzzle project on my Behance profile.
Convex / Concave, it all depends on your point of view!
Although the plates are the same, in the second picture, the indents of the egg plate look more like convex domes rather than concave indents.
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“.
“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.
Do the light gray triangular shapes in the diagram below have the same hue and brightness?
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.
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.
Look at the colored rings from a distance. Then decide which ones have YELLOW inner circles, and which ones have BLUE inner circles.
My optical art has been featured in the February issue of the German science magazine PM.
