To be sincere, I played this for half an hour, but then I got stuck with some colorful cubes. You’ll know what I’m talking about when you get your hands dirty. I can give you some tips, but wouldn’t want to ruin this puzzle for others. So the only thing I’m gonna say, is look behind the suitcase and don’t overlook the corners ;) Hope we can solve this one together using our combined powers! If you show some interest towards these kind of posts, I’ll make sure to bring more in the future!

Here’s one that kept me occupied for days: browsing the net for more stuff, I stumbled upon a peculiar item that kept my attention. This particular die changes its colors somehow, and the mirror that goes with it, doesn’t show what it logically should. I tried, and I tried, but I still can’t seem to understand how the darn thing operates!

You can get the scoop of what I’m talking about via images I’ve included, but the real thing can be seen through the video posted below (inside this article). Tried that? Still no luck? Think it would be easier for me to throw in few bucks, and get my hands on it.

Looking at the video below, do you think you can solve the secret? If you can, please be kind and wait some time before you reveal the answer to others (me included).

Let’s repeat the core: it’s a simple idea really, just place an ordinary die on top of a mirror. In real life, the die has black and red spots like any good die should, but in the reflection it has no spots. When you turn the die, and move it around – still no spots. It’s the damnedest thing and supposedly the effect works with no effort on your part. What’s more, when you flip the dice over – suddenly it has no spots in real life, but spots in the mirror-world appear. Crazy I know, but really amazing. Can we determine exactly how the mirror achieves this unusual effect? If you’d like, you can purchase this illusory toy from our partner store!

What can you see in this picture?

When you run a website like this, it’s on your mind even when you’re not at work. So I had this great thought I wanted to share with you in the second paragraph reserved for my personal bablings, but unfortunately I can’t remember it. This started to happen more often lately, so it’s either me being distracted, or I am aging. Either way, I’ll have to think about carrying some kind of diary with me, and begin writing things down.

I found this illusion last week, and since it wasn’t easy for me to solve it immediately, here’s a test for you… I think it has more to do with Rorschach test, and less with optical illusions in their true nature.

But if I was strictly selecting 100% optical illusions, we wouldn’t have much material to cover. Would we? Anyway, if you look at the top-right picture, it won’t make much sense. All you see is bunch of broken pieces, and some randomly scattered debris. But look what happens if we fill the broken parts with spilled ink… You can see the example in lower-left corner.

Add some ink, and you can see these were letters!

All of a sudden, we have no problem seeing scattered letters where once broken pieces stood. This effect presumably is related to the fact that the borders of letters vs. background are indistinguishable from the borders of letters vs. ink blot.

Where is the ball?

Got another great vid from a friend of mine yesterday. Even though you may think: “What is a magic trick doing on an optical illusions dedicated website”, you’ll quickly change your mind after the clip has ended.

But wait! There is more to it then you probably noticed at first. Be sure to replay the video couple of times, and each time concentrate on another background figure. Are the wooden mannequin, Rubik’s Cube, radio and whole bunch of other items lined as you originally presumed?

Even though magic tricks and optical illusions have whole lot in common, you’ll certainly agree that Chop Cups video has much more to do with illusions, than magicians and tricks. This has to be one of my favorite clips of all times. Btw, it gives me a great pleasure observing the “Top 10 Optical Illusions” chart in our sidebar. It’s like watching a live-growing organism, providing me with real-time feedback of what kind of material my audience really appreciates. Apart from ratings, comments and “top 10 illusions”, I’m thinking of engaging you guys even further. More stuff coming soon!

Chinese Sign Optical Illusion

As I have promised yesterday, new day – new optical illusion! Can you read this Chinese sign on your left? Sure you can! A little self-confidence and some flexing of the muscles in your neck, should do the trick. No additional hints further!

I took some time and added “Symbol” tag to some previous optical illusions that in their nature are similar to this one. If you follow the link, you may find few more “Chinese” illusions there. This should help you further identify the optical illusion used in this sample.

If you didn’t notice, the title of this post contains “Part II” – You guessed, there is Part I as well.

BTW I’ve heard some positive suggestions from you guys. For example: how I should disable the picture from showing its filename, or disable the tags below each post (sometimes they spoil the puzzle). As eager I may be to do that, I’m still not sure if this would be possible. Sure, its easy to remove the tags or simply name the image “xgzgf” or something, but all these tags are necessary for SEO (Google search engine). Seems I’ll have to find another way of masking those…

Yesterday I’ve implemented Akismet spam protection. Since then, it already prevented more than 700 spam comments! Was this precise timing, or what :) Also, our RSS subscriber number is currently exceeding 87,000. If this isn’t a sign of quality service we bring, then I don’t know what is!

Update: seems that the original creator of this illusion is Archimedes Lab. At least their version has the copyright hard coded within the picture. Thnks Michael.

By Permutting the triangular pieces an egg disappears. How does it happen?

Move the Glass from the Tray

Author of this optical illusion is G. Sarcone from Archimedes Lab. Can you find a way to completely remove one of the glasses from this blue tray, while minimizing your effort? Before I show you the solution (after the jump), I’d like to share some site news with you. Am not sure what is happening, but there are some strange circulations present this week. First thing I noticed is that our RSS subscriber number started to go up rather insanely. You can see this in my sidebar.

On Tuesday it showed 51,000, on Wednesday it averaged 66,000, and today we already have more than 80,000 subscribers! Is this awesome or what! Just hope this ain’t no glitch happening on Feedburner’s side. Would ruin my excitement ;) Apart from this good news, some bad things started happening as well. Last few days spammers really put their eye on our community. There were more than 200 spam comments posted per day. It became really painful dealing with them. In my opinion they started flowing via some automated script. Since our site doesn’t use CAPTCHA letters for protection, they were easily entered. This may as well serve as an explanation why your comments need to pass moderation before they are approved.

Simply rotate The Image!

As I’m not the biggest fond of captcha, I decided to install Akismet spam protection plugin, and all should be in balance once again. If my calculations turn correctly, and Akismet truly does its job, who knows – maybe I’ll even disable comment moderation, and your comments may start to appear momentarily (very soon). I’ll keep you informed, in the mean time lets try and solve today’s puzzle.

You can open the pictures in full size by clicking on them. Same goes for yesterday’s Empire game, forgot to mention it. It’s great to receive so many legit comments in just one post (300 valid comments at this moment), but what you should know is that beneath first 50 comments there is “more comments” link which will bring you to the rest of the entires. This is probably why I see all the same movies repetedly posted.  Hope this gets sorted when you get used to “more comments” feature, and when I ditch the comment moderation rule. Btw. I’m testing something with facebook comments, to allow those appear immediately. Logging off…

If the numbers don’t jump out at you immediately, if you have hard time distinguishing the colors apart, or if you aren’t able to easily distinguish at least a vague guess as to what the number is, then you my friend are unfortunately – color blind.

A version of this test can be seen used in the film Little Miss Sunshine, in which a small girl is playing with the vision test chart with her brother. He is not able to see the numbers, or tell the different colors apart well enough to distinguish the numbers. The boy’s goal was to be a pilot, so when he is made aware that he’s colorblind, the poor kid has a small nervous breakdown. As we already stated, color blindness, or color vision deficiency, is the inability to perceive differences between some of the colors that others can distinguish. It is most often of genetic nature, but may also occur because of the eye, nerve, or brain damage, or due to exposure to certain chemicals.

Before we proceed onto our next example, here is a little history lesson: The English chemist John Dalton published the first scientific paper on the subject in 1798, “Extraordinary facts relating to the vision of colors” after the realization of his own color blindness. Because of Dalton’s work, the condition is sometimes called daltonism, although this term is now used for a specific type of color blindness, called deuteranopia. Below you may see the example how one that is colorblind can’t distinguish the numbers on the card. Don’t be mistaken, color blind people don’t see everything in black and white, I just gave this as a guideline so you can understand their inability.

Color blindness is not the swapping of colors in the observer’s eyes. Grass is never red, and stop signs are never green. The color impaired do not learn to call red “green” and vice versa. However, dichromats often confuse red and green items. For example, they may find it difficult to distinguish a Braeburn from a Granny Smith and in some cases, the red and green of a traffic light without other clues (e.g., shape or location). This is demonstrated in this simulation of the two types of apple as viewed by a trichromat or by a dichromat.

In certain situations, color blindness is classed as a disability. However, color blind people have some advantages over people with normal color vision as well! There are some studies which conclude that color blind individuals are better at penetrating certain camouflages.

On your left, you may see another color vision test card. This one is pretty hard, as some individuals with perfect vision may have problems seeing the number inside it – it is 56 if I’m not mistaken.

Hope we learned something useful today. Before I conclude this article, there are some more vision test examples for you to enjoy:

And then some more… Examples below are much bigger in size. If you had no problem recognizing previous numbers, but have more problem distinguishing these, don’t be afraid – it has nothing to do with color blindness. Probably its just that your eyes can’t capture the whole image at once.

This post was written by Vurdlak, with additional help from Vernon Southward of Macro Photography. If you would like to have your article appear on Mighty Optical Illusions as well, feel free to contact us.