If you’re into scary illusions, there was this one particular picture that resembled today’s photo. I think the article went live almost 5 years ago under “Scary Illusion no.5” headline. Be sure to check it out and decide which one you like better. What I do know is that the real answer (for both of these pictures) is trickier than you think!

BTW, I have acknowledged your comments about the “annoying” ad that expands and pushes the content down. As much as it disturbs you, please be kind and endure this with me for few more days until the campaign is over. We got ourselves a brand new dedicated server recently (which costs thousands of dollars), so bear with me cause them ads pay for site operations, and cover all of the expenses. I’ll see what I can do about it, but the alternate “donation” route isn’t something I would prefer…

I don’t know if these shots were taken from an actual photojournalism, or were they just used as a theoretical example, but either way consider this a pretty powerful demonstration. See for yourself how our our perception can be easily shaped, and manipulated with by the media. I believe it isn’t necessary to explain this optical illusion. Photos speak for themselves. Imagine you worked for an administration that wants you to show how soldiers have no mercy when it comes to war. You would use the cropped picture on your left in that case. However, if you worked for the other side, and wanted to depict soldiers as human beings, you would crop the right part of the original photo. There you have it! Such powerful example amazes me, but in the same time scares the sh*t out of me. Which makes me think, should we be more skeptic to stories medias bombard us with?

As the technology exponentially progresses each year, sometimes we have hard time following it. Not to mention understanding new services. For example, in the beginning RSS feeds were so abstract to me, I didn’t even have a clue what to do with them. Same goes for Twitter and Google Wave. It made sense only after I had a practical need for a service of sort, later to learn was supported by mentioned products. Just recently I began understanding Twitter and potential behind it. Then the idea struck me, I could use our official Twitter account to directly post additional illusions, links, articles and photos that never made their way here to moillusions.com website. Even though we have millions of visitors here, it’s somehow hard to get followers for our Twitter account. Care to join our channel?

Check the animation below, or simply click this image

Here’s an interesting approach to original Lilac Chaser illusion, invented many years ago… Wait for the animation to load, and concentrate on the center dot for a minute or so. Normally the skulls are disappearing in a clock-wise direction, but if you manage to stay still and concentrated, you will experience an afterimage of the rotating skull in places (where there shouldn’t be any). Hope you understood all this babling.

Originally I got this optical illusion from here, and have to admit: I was forced to crop the above and below embedded letters. Sorry dear fellow webmaster, hope you don’t take it against me – it’s just that the letters were too big and spammy for the illusion to be useful anywhere elsewhere than on its original website.

This photograph came along with no accompanying description. I can’t tell you who the author is, nor when was this taken. But what I can tell you, is that the shown artwork greatly resembles Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s “Shadow Sculptures“. My next guess would be that the author behind them was Kumi Yamashita. If you have more info, be nice and share. Hope that this illusion wasn’t too scary – it’s just garbage on a stick, after all.

Two Heads are better than one, ayeh?