The winners of the 2009 Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest. And past years. (ante)
posted by dios on May 14, 2009 - 27 comments

Blind Spot Optical Illusions. Online seminar from McCormick Lab at Yale lets you find your own visual blind spots. After that, you can make Monet's sun, and Van Gogh's ear, disappear. [more inside]
posted by cybercoitus interruptus on Jan 11, 2009 - 15 comments

The predictably irrational door game. [more inside]
posted by Rumple on Feb 22, 2008 - 39 comments

Interactive mathematics miscellany and puzzles, including 75 proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem, an interactive column using Java applets, and eye-opening demonstrations. (Actually, much more.)
posted by parudox on Dec 1, 2007 - 11 comments

Illusion art by Octavio Ocampo, a painter from Mexico. Sometimes illusion art is made using unlikely materials, like Jason Mecier's art made out of beans, noodles etc. [previously] or like Scott Blake's barcode images. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye on Apr 24, 2007 - 14 comments

Illusions for sale : The Audience Dis*Member. The Ultimate Levitation. The Wakeling Sawing. The Classic Zig-Zag. And many, many more . If you can't conjure up that kind of scratch, you don't feel lucky or industrious, and your celebrity friends can't help, you could always try the Magic Auctions. Just watch out for that beautiful assistant!
posted by milquetoast on Nov 27, 2005 - 5 comments

“The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die." “The defenses that form a person’s character support a grand illusion, and when we grasp this we can understand the full drivenness of man. He is driven away from himself, from self-knowledge, self-reflection. He is driven toward things that support the lie of his character.” Words of Ernest Becker, here summarizing Gestalt therapy and his own existential perspectives in Growing Up Rugged.
posted by semmi on Oct 4, 2005 - 26 comments

Motion induced blindess. Be sure to check out the other really cool stuff
posted by elemenopee on Apr 18, 2005 - 20 comments

The sculptures of Shigeo Fukuda show that shadows and reflections (mpegs) may not be what they appear to be. When you turn M.C. Escher's drawings into sculptures, you can get some impossible objects (mpeg). And Dick Termes paintings on globes are stunning examples (Quicktime) of six point perspective. All of these works of illusionary art are featured in the book Masters of Deception: Escher, Dalí & the Artists of Optical Illusion and must be seen to be believed.
posted by euphorb on Nov 15, 2004 - 6 comments

Hidden pictures! In an effort to get back to that "best of the web" thing, here are some cool hidden pictures within pictures. Can you find them all without looking at the answers? (from B3ta)
posted by salmacis on Nov 3, 2004 - 14 comments

The Thatcher Illusion (using Madonna) , the original, Bush
posted by srboisvert on Mar 21, 2004 - 25 comments

sandlot science ... optical illusions and visual oddities... hundreds of exhibits and interactive demonstrations.
posted by crunchland on Nov 3, 2003 - 4 comments

You think it's moving but it's not.
posted by xmutex on Jul 24, 2003 - 85 comments

headacher
posted by crunchland on Jun 27, 2003 - 26 comments

A professor of vision science at MIT understands that life isn't just black and white, even though we often see it that way. This amazing illusion proves it, and these slick, fast-loading, Flash demonstrations of lightness perception show how it's done. (My favorite is the "Koffka Ring".) White paper here, for deeper background.
posted by taz on Sep 27, 2002 - 29 comments

I'm usually not a big fan of optical illusions (unless there's a nice magic trick built around it), but this one is pretty brain-burning. (Yes, that's my entire front-page post. But hey: at least it ain't a news story.)
posted by Shadowkeeper on Oct 18, 2001 - 29 comments