Few days ago, Laura Bee sent me this photo by a Chinese artist called Xu Bing. Attached photo was taken on one of Xu’s classes titled: Square Calligraphy Classroom. The intention of this installation was to simulate a classroom-like setting, in a gallery or museum space. Desks are arranged with small containers of ink, brushes and a copybook with instructions on the basic principles of New English Calligraphy, a writing system invented and designed by the artist.
As people attempt to recognize and write these words, some of the thinking patterns that have been ingrained in them since they learned to read are challenged. It is the artists’ belief that people must have their routine thinking attacked in this way. While undergoing this process of estrangement and re-familiarization with one’s written language, the audience is reminded that the sensation of distance between other systems of language and one’s own is largely self-induced. That being said, if you look closely you’ll find the below characters not so hard to read…
(11 votes) 
"Afghan Girl" by Steve McCurry
Probably all of you saw this picture at some point of your life. Titled the “Afghan Girl”, this photo was named the most recognized photograph in the history of National Geographic. Although girl’s name was not known, her picture appeared on the June 1985 cover of the magazine. The image of her face, with a red scarf draped loosely over her head and with her piercing sea-green eyes staring directly into the camera, became a symbol both of the 1980s Afghan conflict and of the refugee situation worldwide. Gula was known throughout the world simply as the Afghan Girl until she was formally identified in early 2002.
Over time, many variations of Steve McCurry’s original photo appeared. At some point even in optical illusion form, as we see below. All I could find about this illusion, is that people can’t seem to look at it for too long. Apparently you get a headache, or become nervous at best. Maybe this isn’t the true nature of this illusion, but it just didn’t make me hallucinate like some other animations did. Wait few seconds for the animation to load (it’s 1MB big), and share your experience afterward.
(16 votes) One of our fans, mr. Jacenty found what appears to be the best hollow face optical illusion up to date. The hollow face illusion, as mentioned more than few times, gives you impression that the object you are seeing is embossed, while in reality it’s embedded. Sometimes the illusion works vice-versa as well. To remind you, convex equals embossed, while concave means embedded. First time I was introduced to this type of illusion, is when I saw Little Green Dragon video – the post that ranks well among top ten optical illusions of all time.
During my holidays in Spain in 2008 I found a nice optical illusion on one of the Barcelona’s houses. The head is concave, but with this lighting it looks like it is convex. Greetings from Calgary – Jacenty
(15 votes) 
I’ve been working on this website for the last few days, it’s just that the work being done was held on the back-end side. This is why there hasn’t been any updates for the last two days. My deepest apologies.
Anyhow, recently I’ve noticed hysteria among chicks over this vampire saga called Twilight. My girlfriend read them books couple of times, and even forced me to watch actual movie with her. I would be lying if I didn’t say I was bored at best. Don’t know, I simply see it as ordinary vampire move redefined to suit women, but then again – I could be wrong.
Still, if there are any fans of the movie out there, I’ve received these two optical illusions of main actor – Robert Pattinson, so hope you enjoy them!
First one on the right is simple afterimage (if you don’t know how afterimages work, read this first). It works best if you switch your view to blank white screen, after burning the negative image in your retina. Perpetual blinking helps additionally. This one worked great for me! Few more afterimage illusions can be found here.
The second illusion of Robert Pettinson (on your left), is a simple photograph caught in the right moment. When I first saw it, I got impression this dude is wearing some kind of tennis hat and has really alien-ish head anatomy. When you take a closer look, you’ll quickly realize there is actually another person standing behind him.
There, I believe these two illusions weren’t the best ones available, but still we can’t have Greatest Illusions each day. Can we? Btw. check this promotion of Fight Club, done for the 10th anniversary. It will show you the power of Facebook Connect!
(11 votes) A dramatic picture taken by Michael Nolan has been dubbed the face of Mother Nature crying on a canvas of melting ice and cascading water on a Norwegian Glacier. Randy Schutt discovered this amazing photo which shows a crying face in an ice cap located on Nordaustlandet, in the Svalbard archipelago of Norway. The tears of this natural sculpture were created by a waterfall of glacial water cascading from one of the face’s eyes, thus painting an alarming picture warning the world about the effects of global warming. Michael Nolan is a marine photographer and environmental lecturer. He has captured this picture while on an annual voyage to observe the glacier and surrounding wildlife. It’s best to quote Nolan’s words on this:
This is how one would imagine mother nature would express her sentiments about our inability to reduce global warming. It seemed an obvious place for her to appear, on a retreating ice shelf, crying.”
(21 votes) What we see here, is a hungry lion jumping on to the bonnet of an open-topped truck, snarling straight into the faces of safari family. The amazing part is they just roar with laughter. Normally, placing stone-cold masochists on an illusion oriented blog makes no sense. But this close encounter of the furred kind is not all it seems. The trick is that apparently fearless wildlife watchers are actually safely protected behind a wall of reinforced glass. Only the front of the truck is placed inside the big cat’s territory.
Why are they laughing? I would be terrified if some predator jumped on my vehicle!
You’ll have to agree with me on this one; from a certain angle it really looks as if the visitors are about to become lunch. This illusory installation is one of the main attractions at Werribee open range zoo near Melbourne, Australia. Spokesmen of the zoo said once:
The cut-off Land Rover was stuck either side of the glass wall as a bit of fun and it’s proved a big hit – especially with the kids. Everyone wants to get their picture taken looking like they’re going to be eaten.”
(12 votes) Reading the title, and understanding it came directly from me, I suppose adds some weight to the actual Leopard Illusion you see below. It’s hard for me to explain how this illusion came to be, without revealing the actual solution, thus ruining the surprise-effect for you. There is much relevant info and background for it, but for now I’ll retain myself just on revealing the author behind it – the magnificent Craig Tracy. First thing you’ll notice is that it’s not some photo of an actual animal, rather a realistically painted picture. But you’re still far from seeing the illusion. Only tip I can give you, is that leopard’s eyes were painted on a concrete floor. I suggest you examine the picture more closely before seeing this final hint. I’ll monitor the forthcoming ratings, and am eager to see if you agree with me that this must be one of the best optical illusions ever created!
(109 votes) 
I did something extremely important yesterday. It took more than 6 hours of tempering with Mighty Optical Illusions source code, but the results have already proven themselves. You might ask “What was it? The website still looks perfectly identical!”. Well, in order to fully load the page previously, you had to wait for all the ads to load first, and only then the whole page was constructed in your browsers. This took some time, and many of you argued how the website is too slow. I made big changes yesterday, and now the website loads MUCH faster. Have you noticed this? I managed to place all the adds at the end of our HTML code, so now ads load separately only after the complete website is shown to you.
This means you get the content immediately, and you can proceed reading articles instantly, while the ads are still loading themselves in the sidebar. Hope some of you appreciate this. At least the impression count in my stats states so. With this move I have reduced my income significantly, but your satisfaction is still primary to me. I would just appreciate any kind of feedback, and please report any problems/glitches you might have noticed.
For the illusion of the day, this picture was spotted by Syed Ali (cool name dude!) on a major internet homepage. It was released in honor of Wallace and Gromit 20th anniversary. Except from showing two of the main characters, this picture contains additional subliminal message. If you “decipher” the message, you’ll quickly realize which major website used the pic. Happy hunting!
(16 votes) 
The secret lies in the branches
I don’t feel much inspired for writing today, better yet – last few days I was completely hit by writers block. Above all this, my keypad stopped responding when I enter “space” tab. I think there is some kind of food element stuck beneath it, but who knows. So after I wrote this article, I needed to copy-paste each “space” line between words and construction elements. Think about it for a second! How much of unnecessary work am I talking here.
But I’m not gonna allow such a trivial problem stand between me and this blog. No way! I already purchased Dell’s wireless keyboard, and hopefully it will arrive tomorrow. Check the photo I linked, and please give me some feedback if you’ve had the opportunity to use it by any chance. I just hope I didn’t make the wrong decision, based only on viewing a single photo of it.
Not to bore you with my personal “problems”, I chose this simple picture (you see on your left) for today. I think the illusion is very simple to see, but the idea behind is very nice if you ask me. Hopefully you skipped reading the title, the descriptive tags beneath, and will solve the optical illusions yourselves. What are the tree branches hiding?
You can find some related optical illusions here, here and here. Enjoy!
(12 votes) 
Google Street View Illusion
Apart from playing with design, I’m obsessed with new internet trends and emerging technologies. As much as I love sharing original illusions with you, I’m even more thrilled when I get the opportunity to introduce you with something you probably never thought of using when searching for optical illusions. Hope you approve my style, where I try to fuse our illusion topic as much as I can with modern options.
I think it’s refreshing to see our standard content, using different approach occasionally. Our friend, João Marques took his time to introduce us to Google Street View. By now, all of you used Google Maps at some point of your life. Well, at some major cities Google’s mobile crew took high res photos of surrounding areas, while cruising down the local streets. This caused a lot of controversy, as sometimes citizen privacy was invaded, but on the other hand – it helped cops catch crooks in Netherlands.
João has been a daily follower of MOI for some months, and decided to give something back. Before presenting us with the illusion, he thanked us for managing this website with wisdom, “posting only very interesting stuff.” Move around this interactive window, and try to spot what João found so interesting…
I was spending some time in Google Street View, when I saw some guys doing something strange in an window. I zoomed more and found that it was a mural painting, and was completely tricked. – João
(12 votes) 
