60 Optical Illusions

Yes i know, its not really related to my site but I thought that the new cool category needs some articles and you´d probably enjoy it nevertheless. Best to use on co-workers, friends aso. All illusions are explained in detail, telling you exactly what will happen when you look at them.

Most involve movement which you can alter using buttons to change the effect. The illusions are divided into eight categories: Motion and Time, Luminance and Contrast, Color, Geometric- and Angle Illusions, Size Constancy, Cognitive- / Gestalt Effects and What’s special about faces?

Just head over to michaelbach.de and take a look at the optical illusions, you can also take a full tour.

Review of Michael Bach Page

The Michael Bach page comes packed with information on one side and various images for you to look at on the right side of the screen. The first thing that you will notice when you are scrolling through the page are a pair of eyes that follow your cursor everywhere it goes. It is kind of neat and at the same time kind of annoying especially when you are trying to read content and don’t realize that it is following the cursor and don’t know how to get it out of the way.

If you don’t like websites that can fit in your screen then you won’t like this one as it requires you to do some amount of scrolling to get to the bottom. It also has the patterned background that shows up first which makes you wonder for a couple seconds if you will actually land on a website page or if this is the only illusion.

Apart from the illusions to the right side you will also find lists with a link to each illusion below the informative piece on the left of the page. As mentioned before you have to do a bit of scrolling so you may not even realize that there are more illusions that you can look at. And as you scroll those eyes follow; if you scroll fast, they follow fast and if you scroll slowly they follow slowly – especially annoying if you are already having problems navigating the website.

One you click on illusion two menu buttons pop up at the top so you can go to the next or previous illusion in the list. This is especially good if you are not looking for anything in particular or if you would rather not go back to the home page after each viewing. The latter will prove to be tedious if you want to look at a number of illusions so using the next and previous buttons will help you get through the list quicker.

Talking about the list, it is quite a large list of illusions. They not only give you a visual but they also give you an explanation. Also some of the illusions help you to get the picture by giving you the opportunity to change the colors, contrast, speed and other settings of the visual. This is very cool since you do not usually get the opportunity to do that for visual illusions. You usually only are allowed to look at them and if you see it, you see it and if you don’t then you simply don’t but this website provides you with an interactive way of looking at a visual illusion and gives you a real chance of seeing the illusion.

All in all it is a good website if you are interested in optical illusions and usually use them to pass the time. You will find an ample amount of these illusions on the Michael Bach page and you can find useful information there as well. Whether your interest in optical illusions has recently sparked or these are things that you have been studying for a long time this website is really neat and is worth the visit; putting aside the annoying eyes.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Wednesday December 7, 2005 -
Tags:Cool, eye, fun, illusion, optical, seeing