Comments on: Mr Angry & Mrs Calm

Mr Angry & Mrs Calm

smackfu — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 09:48:16 -0800

Mr Angry & Mrs Calm. This illusion will BLOW YOUR MIND.

By: Kickstart70

Kickstart70 — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 09:53:48 -0800

Whoa. How does this work?

By: 327.ca

327.ca — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 09:53:56 -0800

That's interesting. I get the same effect viewing at the same distance by just squinting.

By: brownpau

brownpau — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 09:54:59 -0800

The blurry underlays are switched, and when you're far away, you see the broader blur rather than the fine details.

By: robocop is bleeding

robocop is bleeding — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 09:57:05 -0800

That's pretty cool, even if I did trip over a stool while walking backwards from my desk.

By: spicynuts

spicynuts — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 09:58:37 -0800

Either my eyes or my laptop are screwed because there is no distance at which they switch places. Perhaps it's due to the angle of my screen?

By: SharQ

SharQ — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 09:58:51 -0800

It has to do with highlights - the highlights in the detailed image are discarded up close, but once you get far enough away, the shading causes the person to look angry. And vice-versa.

By: 327.ca

327.ca — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 09:59:24 -0800

How does this work? I'm guessing that, in lieu of the detail that's available when we're close up, our brains extrapolate based on light and dark tones in the face. For instance, the lips on the right-hand face are lighter than they should be, and from a distance (or when I squint) it looks like the mouth of the left-hand face. Also, there's a dark tone above the eyebrows of the left-hand face that become the "calm" eyebrows when viewed from a distance.

By: Optimus Chyme

Optimus Chyme — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 09:59:25 -0800

Clickable GIF for the lazy (480k):

By: Acey

Acey — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 09:59:35 -0800

Most optical illusions are so-so. This is truely brilliant. I will print it and post it everywhere!

By: SharQ

SharQ — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 09:59:45 -0800

"Either my eyes or my laptop are screwed because there is no distance at which they switch places. Perhaps it's due to the angle of my screen?" I got the same. It's mostly down to having abnormally good eye-sight. The blurred image doesn't blur sufficiently for you to get a problem with it. Try squinting, or look at the resized versions.

By: Peter H

Peter H — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 10:02:40 -0800

Amazingly, the same can be said for metafilter posts. If you read them up close the odd sentences are calm, the even ones are angry. But squint or read them from a distance and it flips.

By: Bugbread

Bugbread — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 10:03:20 -0800

Use this page to see what it was supposed to look like (until I looked at the page, I didn't realize that by "if you view it from a distance", it meant over 10 feet away)

By: Peter H

Peter H — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 10:03:38 -0800

Also, with regard to the image - I've known chicks like that.

By: brownpau

brownpau — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 10:05:52 -0800

By: bondcliff

bondcliff — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 10:07:04 -0800

Woah. Maybe this is a question for AskMe, but how the hell do people come up with optical illusions? I suppose some of them are invented by accident, but what about the others? Also, there's a chicken and egg question. Most of these illusions seem to work because of the way our eyes and brains interact, but are illusions created based on someone's knowledge of the eye/brain or do they discover things about the eye/brain by testing people with illusions? If the later, then how do they come up with the illusion to test people with? I bet marijuana is involved somehow.

By: whatzit

whatzit — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 10:15:24 -0800

bondcliff: I happened to be reading a textbook on perception this weekend, and it was the chicken. Here's one example from the book: The Hermann grid was apparently known for a long time, but the reasons for it weren't really investigated until it got used on some university publication, and thence began the research and the explanations that are now easily available to us.

By: OmieWise

OmieWise — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 10:18:24 -0800

Very cool. Thanks for the seat-cheat brownpau.

By: Optimus Chyme

Optimus Chyme — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 10:20:54 -0800

Very cool. Thanks for the seat-cheat brownpau. posted by OmieWise at 10:18 AM PST on October 25 >:(

By: OmieWise

OmieWise — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 10:23:15 -0800

I know, O.C., I meant to add that I was too lazy to click on your link. ;>

By: lagavulin

lagavulin — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 10:24:56 -0800

Also, with regard to the image - I've known chicks like that. Tee Hee. This is Lambert's Inverse Beer Square Law in operation. Or something.

By: Pollomacho

Pollomacho — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 10:25:22 -0800

Why do they both look like Bob Dobbs to me?

By: Smedleyman

Smedleyman — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 10:32:47 -0800

Nifty

By: Bugbread

Bugbread — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 10:42:44 -0800

Pollomacho : "Why do they both look like Bob Dobbs to me?" The one on the right (at a distance) is definitely an angry Dobbshead.

By: greycap

greycap — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 10:48:49 -0800

The left hand Mr Angry looks like a bit like an alien in a low-budget sci-fi film to me. Very cool link, though.

By: CheeseburgerBrown

CheeseburgerBrown — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 10:52:29 -0800

H'm...I still can't seem to see Jesus. I'm going to try again with one eye tied behind my back.

By: DevilsAdvocate

DevilsAdvocate — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 11:36:22 -0800

Apparently it can be done with any two faces; the fact that one is angry and one calm, in this case, is just icing on the cake. See the Thatcher-Blair illusion at the bottom of this page. Salvador Dali's painting "Lincoln in Dalivision" does the same kind of thing, but it's easier to see what's going on. "Either my eyes or my laptop are screwed because there is no distance at which they switch places. Perhaps it's due to the angle of my screen?" I got the same. It's mostly down to having abnormally good eye-sight. I concur. When I first saw this, I stood about eight feet away from my monitor, and the one on the left was still angry. Then I took off my glasses, and saw the one on the left as calm and the right one as angry.

By: tzelig

tzelig — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 12:00:17 -0800

Interesting optical effect, still waiting for it to "blow my mind". Thanks for the link. http://www.grand-illusions.com/

By: weapons-grade pandemonium

weapons-grade pandemonium — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 12:06:14 -0800

Cool trick. I want to try this with quonsar and mathowie.

By: weapons-grade pandemonium

weapons-grade pandemonium — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 12:12:41 -0800

It might have been wise to link to the originators instead.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 12:17:07 -0800

I liked this presentation better, and it gives fair credit, so no harm done.

By: Mr T

Mr T — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 12:24:24 -0800

Too late, my mind's been blown for a while. But thanks for the link, I hadn't seen this before.

By: brownpau

brownpau — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 12:51:22 -0800

Ooops, sorry, Optimus Chyme. My reading comprehension is notoriously bad.

By: Substrata

Substrata — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 14:44:51 -0800

is it still caps lock day ?

By: shoepal

shoepal — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 17:09:46 -0800

freaky!

By: soyjoy

soyjoy — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 20:35:22 -0800

Cool stuff! How much of the illusion of the small "angry" face is filled in by our memory of the big "angry" face and how much of it is actually, visually there?

By: mowglisambo

mowglisambo — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 21:08:23 -0800

One of the illustion's inventors is a colleague of mine... not that it makes me an expert on the topic, but the way this illusion works is that the "high spatial frequency" (i.e. details) are processed by the visual system when available. When they stop being visible (e.g. when you squint or stumble away from your laptop) "low spatial frequency" is the only visible information, so that's what you see (in lesser detail, of course). Brownpau, don't take down that animated gif yet... I showed it to her so that she might add it to the lab's website as a snazzier way to demonstrate the effect... with your permission of course. To answer the question about how visual illusions are come upon, these days most such illusions are thought about ahead of time-- the equivalent of a hypothesis. Then you test the hypothesis (create the image, and tweak) to see if it works the way you predicted, in line with the prevailing wisdom/you pet theory/etc. Older illusions were happened upon more serendipidously. These days the obvious ones have been documented and vision scientists have to root around for more obscure (but no less interesting) ones. Here's another one that's always blown my mind (from another scientist in the same department).

By: Eideteker

Eideteker — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 21:11:40 -0800

brownpau: After reading this thread, that scared me shitless. God, an hour lost reading about bad horror movies.

By: Civil_Disobedient

Civil_Disobedient — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 09:04:16 -0800

Can someone please explain what I'm supposed to be seeing here? As the faces zoom out, they slowly morph into the other. What's so cool about that? Honest question.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 09:42:50 -0800

The images are just resized. No software morphing at all. You're meant to see the effect by physically moving farther away -- the zooming is just simulating that for the lazy.

By: tzelig

tzelig — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 11:06:01 -0800

This might blow my buttons. Link courtesy Boing*2. http://dashslot.co.uk/modules/xcgal/albums/userpics/10001/Ambiguous-Text.jpg

By: Eamon

Eamon — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 11:24:17 -0800

whatzit: Not quite. Sometimes it's the chicken, sometimes the egg. In the case of this, Oliva has been studying this sort of thing throughout her career. mowglisambo: Are you in vision science? Aude's posters at VSS left a strong impression on me. MIT is one of the schools to which I'm applying because she and George Alvarez are there.

By: mowglisambo

mowglisambo — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 12:19:48 -0800

Eamon: I do work in vision science, but not Aude's lab. Maybe I'll see you at VSS this year. :)