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.
My autokinetic optic art will be presented and discussed in the German fashion magazine “Barbara” to be released on July 8.
Curiously enough, the cubes don’t move only the background color changes…
Here is my tutorial to create an amazing autokinetic animation.
Our visual system can interpret colors and shades in surprising ways. This 3×3 Tic-Tac-Toe grid, for example, showcases how easily our perception of brightness can be fooled.
Do you notice anything unusual in the grid below?
The looping animation below brings the illusion to life, revealing the trick in action. That large green square behind the grid isn’t actually uniform—it’s made up of alternating dark and light green squares. Our visual system works like a “comparative computer”. In fact, we never see colors in isolation, as the appearance of any color is affected by the colors surrounding it. So, under certain conditions, colors that are identical may appear different, while colors that are different may look the same. In our visual system there is a mechanism that enhances the contrast of the outline of an object relative to its background: it is called “lateral inhibition”.
Show / Hide the Trick
Thus, even small differences in brightness between adjacent zones, or objects, are deliberately increased by our visual system and the brain to better distinguish them. But something strange happens when the brightness boundaries of the color zones are concealed: the cues the brain needs to trigger the lateral inhibition no longer exist and consequently we become blind to variations in color brightness, as shown in the animated gif.
Recognitions
My optical illusion “Magic Tic-Tac-Toe” has been chosen to be among the top 10 finalists for the “2019 Best Illusion of the Year Contest”
Order now your exclusive “Illusion d’Optique” playing card deck designed by illusion Master Gianni A. Sarcone!
Packaging printed with optical ink and placed in a protective transparent plastic case.
54 eye-popping optical illusions to play and to experiment with!
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“Everything we see hides another thing;
we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.”
– René Magritte
My book “Fantastic Optical Illusions” (ISBN: 178739235X) features all the best and most interesting illusion types: ambiguous and impossible figures, hidden objects, color and brightness effects, length, size and shape misperceptions, illusory moving patterns and image paradoxes.
This best-selling book has been first printed in 2004, since then I have made important updates on the latest discoveries in the world of perception, to be sure the book will continue to amaze both the young and the adult reader.
Available from Amazon UK and Amazon USA.
We live in a “reallusive” world… Illusions are not totally unreal, because we feel them as they were real. Reality is also a kind of ‘illusion’. The outside world is mediated through our sense organs: vision, hearing, taste, touch and smell. All what we perceive and feel are just REPRESENTATIONS of reality, not the reality itself.
Children have a different way of looking at the world. So, writing and illustrating optical illusion books for kids is not an easy task, because they are less fooled by visual illusions than adults. This is due to the fact that brain’s capacity to consider the CONTEXT of visual scenes, and not just focus on SINGLE PARTS of scenes, develops very slowly.
My new work “Optical Illusions” will make you question: “is seeing believing?”… The brain is an amazing thing, but it doesn’t always get things right when it comes to sight. My book is here to explain why, with astounding images, baffling puzzles, and simple reveals.
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