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.
Geometric shapes are not limited only to the figurative aspect, they can also play active roles, for instance, serving in microelectronics to build operational printed circuits such as: small inductors (magnified, fig. a below), resistors (fig. b) and capacitors (fig. c). (image taken from my book “Almanach du Mathématicien en Herbe“)
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“.
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.
Look at the colored rings from a distance. Then decide which ones have YELLOW inner circles, and which ones have BLUE inner circles.
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 optical art has been featured in the February issue of the German science magazine PM.
