illusion
esiegel | September 22, 2013Note: This post has been updated and improved as of 2014 here, at the new Starts With A Bang blog. What follows, below, is the original version that was first published here.
"I love the sounds and the power of pounding water, whether it is the waves or a waterfall." -Mike May
The world's oceans have always been special to me, and bodies of water in general. The air smells different, the wind blows cool, and you're reminded of the power of the salty seas every time you step in. It's one of the reasons that the old sea shanties have always fascinated me. This week, have a listen to an updated…
esiegel | June 16, 2013"Illusion is the first of all pleasures." -Oscar Wilde
It's tough to tell fact from fiction, and sometimes just as hard to tell reality from illusion. As long as you're enjoying yourself this weekend, I'd have to agree with Buckwheat Zydeco, and say
Let The Good Times Roll.
But despite what these images you're looking at might seem to show, there's nothing rolling at all here.
Image credit: Illustrator Fiestoforo.
Nor is anything moving, nor is there a hint of animation in any of these. Yet, based on what your eyes show you, things appear to be bulging, spinning, or more generally, there…
esiegel | November 24, 2012“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, 'Wow! What a Ride!'” -Hunter S. Thompson
For those of you who've never experienced exactly what it feels like to alter your perceptions, and for those of you who have but don't want to spend hours and hours experiencing the effects, your options have traditionally been limited. Perhaps a song might provide a window into the experience for you, such as M. Ward's…
neurophilosophy | March 23, 2010
Click to enlarge images
ARTISTS employ a number of different techniques to represent implied motion in two-dimensional works. One of these, commonly used in posters, comics and animation, is the affine shear effect, whereby a moving object is depicted as leaning into the direction of movement. Cartoonists also use action lines to depict movement and speed, with straight lines conveying fast movements and wavy lines conveying slower ones. Motion can also be conveyed by superimposing several images showing the successive positions of a movement, or by a blurred image showing the different…
esiegel | February 21, 2010When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about.
-Albert Einstein
I woke up this morning with the Sun in my face, which marks the first time all year that that's happened.
(The irony, that I'm now listening to the Grateful Dead's "Looks Like Rain.")
And after a few seconds had passed (you know, it takes me a few seconds to realize that I'm not still in my dream, trying to navigate through some bizarre hotel corridor), I realized I couldn't read the numbers on my old LED alarm clock.…
bioephemera | February 1, 2010
Matthew Albanese makes miniature dioramas out of everyday materials and photographs them, producing Uncanny Valley landscapes that seem almost, but not quite, real. His Paprika Mars, above, is made of 12 pounds of charcoal and spices (paprika, cinnamon, nutmeg, chili powder). Fields, After the Storm, below, is mostly faux fur and cotton.
Albanese's scenes are convincing precisely because they're so paradigmatic - the standard desolate planetary surface, Western grassland, etc. His work exploits our cognitive tendencies to interpret stimuli against the backdrop of our experience, especially…
neurophilosophy | November 6, 2009A novel temporal illusion, in which the cause of an event is perceived to occur after the event itself, provides some insight into the brain mechanisms underlying conscious perception. The illusion, described in the journal Current Biology by a team of researchers from France, suggests that the unconscious representation of a visual object is processed for around one tenth of a second before it enters conscious awareness.
Chien-Te Wu and his colleagues at the Brain and Cognition Research Centre in Toulouse used a visual phenomenon called motion-induced blindness, in which a constantly…
neurophilosophy | October 8, 2009SECOND LIFE is an online "virtual world" which enables users to create a customised avatar, or digital persona, with which they can interact with each other. It has become incredibly popular since its launch just over 6 years ago, with millions of "residents" now using it regularly to meet others, socialize and even to have virtual sex. Second Life is now filled with virtual communities and institutions - it has businesses and universities, and its own virtual economy.
Now, imagine a futuristic version of Second Life, in which avatars can transfer sensations to the bodies of their users.…
edyong | July 28, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
The idea of an out-of-body experiences seems strange and hokey - certainly not one that would grace one of the world's top scientific journals. So it may seem surprising that two years ago, Science published not one, but two papers that considered the subject through the lens of scientific scrutiny.
Out-of-body experiences are rare and can be caused by epileptic fits, neurological conditions such as strokes and heavy drug abuse. Clearly, they are triggered when something goes wrong in our brains.…
bioephemera | May 3, 2009
Following up on my previous post about visual illusions, reader Jake alerted me to this story from the BBC:
A design student made a battered old Skoda "disappear" by painting it to merge with the surrounding car park. Sara Watson, who is studying drawing at the University of Central Lancashire (Uclan), took three weeks to transform the car's appearance.
Note that like a trompe l'oeil painting in a building, or an anamorphic projection, the perspective work on the car will only allow it to "blend in" seamlessly when seen from a specific vantage point - which might be why we only have one…
bioephemera | May 2, 2009
The Ambassadors, 1533
Hans Holbein the Younger
In the artistic technique called anamorphosis, an object is depicted in distorted perspective, so that the viewer has to take special action, like looking from a specific angle, to see the "correct" image.
The most famous example of anamorphic painting is Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors (1533), a double portrait in which the illusion of highly detailed reality is fractured by a blurred grey streak superimposed across the painting's bottom third. If one stands at an acute angle, close to the painting, the blurred streak resolves itself into a…
edyong | December 2, 2008A ridiculous number of science-fiction TV series and films have moments where characters exchange minds, from the brilliance of Quantum Leap to the latest season of Heroes. Body-swapping is such a staple of imaginative fiction that it's tempting to think that it has no place being scientifically investigated. But Valeria Petkova and Henrik Ehrsson beg to differ - while actually exchanging minds is clearly impossible, these two scientists have created an illusion that can make people feel that another body - be it a mannequin or an actual person - is really theirs.
The idea that our bodies…
esiegel | February 9, 2008Starts With A Bang! is off to a great start; each the past three days we have topped the 100 visitor mark, bringing our total number of unique visitors up to 1,413! I'm going to attempt to start a new tradition here of making a weekend post on a topic that I just find neat, and share it with you. This first Weekend Diversion is an optical illusion about color. Take a look at the image below:
Looks like a cube with a bunch of different colors on it. Now do the following:
Look at the top face of the cube, and tell me what color the tile in the middle of that face is.
Look at the near face,…
sb admin | October 12, 2007Via Metacafe, here's an audio/visual illusion involving reading lips and seeing voices (nothing to do with synaesthesia) called the McGurk Effect.