It seems that people are remarkably bad at noticing when moving objects change in brightness, color, size, or shape. The researchers present a new visual illusion that “causes objects that had once been obviously dynamic to suddenly appear static,” and that “demonstrates the tight coupling of motion and object appearance.” The results have implications for everything from video game design to the training of pilots.

Play the movie below, while looking at the small white speck in the center of the ring. At first, the ring is motionless and it’s easy to tell that the dots are changing color. When the ring begins to rotate, the dots suddenly appear to stop changing. But in reality they are changing the entire time. Take a look, it’s marvelous!

10) Guido Moretti’s Ambiguous Art

When posted, this illusion didn’t attract as much attention as I hoped it would. Perhaps I didn’t explain it well enough, or simply I was isolated in linking with this one. I just can’t stop admiring to some of Guido’s ambiguous creations. Another 2009 favorite of this type was Encore by Shigeo Fukuda.

9) Running Spirals Illusion

“Why the heck has Vurdlak decided to include these boring old spirals in his collection, when we already saw bunch of them over the time?” Well, out of the all motion-moving and seemingly animated illusions, I have to say I never saw any capable of fooling me this hard! With all my optical illusion experience behind me, I still struggled into believing this one is static!

8) Slanted Seesaw Optical Illusion

After posting the original See Saw, Mr. Anonymous created an animated GIF that strengthened the effect even further! Look how our see-saw switches between unbalanced and balanced, when all we do, is remove the filling pattern on second identical frame.

7) Tears Of Mother Earth

I believe there is no need explaining why I included this photo of Mother Earth. Have you ever seen a non-photoshopped photo of a nature, that resembled a face in so much details?

6) Chop-Cup: “Where is The Ball” Video

By now, most of you got to know me, and my unexplainable resistance to posting video illusion. Still, this has to be the coolest optical illusion video after the Little Green Dragon! Another one posted in 2009 worth mentioning, would be: Pocket Rocket.

5) Umm, It’s Just Paper!

What would you expect from a guy in middle of his twenties? I love all that is sexy, and it wasn’t easy not to spam this list with more than 10 illusions from my Sexy Category. My self-control prevailed, so I included only one. I’m still not sure whether Sexy Lamp should have won this spot…

4) Audi R8 Optical Illusion Animation

Yup, I appreciate visually appealing illusions the most. Like them even better if they’re effective and make you say Wow! Xaver Nitsch managed to create such one. It kept my attention, and stayed in my memory. The twist was a little different than what we were previously used to see when looking at Relative Cars.

3) Cyrillic Exam Optical Illusion

What can I say? I must be a an addict when it comes to languages and cryptography. In my first compilation for this list, there were more than 4 similar ones involving exotic writings. Finally, I decided against Secret Arabic Message, Square Calligraphy Classroom and Learn Chinese the Easy Way. Cyrillic felt somehow closest to my geo-location.

2) Gulliver in a Land of Lilliput

Why did I chose this one? Well, because it was one of those rare ones that kept me thinking and gave me hard time understanding it. Usually relative-size illusions are obvious, but this one forces you to think!

1) Leopard Illusion

Even though I can’t say for sure that all of the above illusions are truly ranked in correct order, what I am certain of, is that Craig Tabary’s body painted Leopard marked 2009 for me. Perhaps it wasn’t the most realistic body paint drawing we had opportunity to see, but it was the hardest one to distinguish from a flat drawing. This is my favorite optical illusion in 2009. Another body paint illusion worth mentioning would be: Amazing Obama.

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?

Sandro Del-Prete was born in 1937, and is a Swiss artist who paints figures, situations and processes that cannot exist in the real world. Comparisons can be drawn between Del-Prete and Escher’s artwork, although they differ in subject matter, style, mood and technique. Del-Prete greatly admires Escher and believes that they are ‘kindred spirits’, however the viewer will find very little mathematical precision in Del-Prete’s work, something that is always present in Escher’s work.

Sandro Del Prete - Crusader Illusion

Check out the previous work of Sandro Del Prete

Smiling watch illusion

I have just remembered this cheap little trick a friend of mine, Boris told me once. Try looking at any watch store window, or if you are inpatient, and  wish to check this right now, you can use Google image search. Enter the search term “watch”, and search for wrist watches  or clocks. You will notice that 90% of the results (if not all of them); all the analog watches have their hands set on the exact same time – 10:10 (or 22:10  if you prefer). This is NO accident. Sellers do their best to comfort the buyers. Even if it takes making watches smile back at you. Unbelievable, is it? Well, marketers will do just about anything to sell their stuff. Even stranger is that this cheap trick actually works!

Sad watch illusion

Look at the both images in this article. If you liked these two watches, which one would you buy first? Just to remind you, they are both the same. Its just that the second image was rotated by 180 degrees. Weird, huh?

Click To Expand The Solution!

I’m sorry that in every post I babble about Mighty Tricks website, but you have to realize that it’s a new project of mine, and I’m just trying to make it more popular, informing wider public about it. Now let’s jump to our new illusion. For today I prepared an interesting spot the object painting, created by American wildlife artist Rusty Rust, that shows a huge Bengal Tiger standing in a bamboo forest. We had a similar Lion Illusion, Panda Bears Illusion, Wolves Illusion, and many more… If you are asking yourself why Rusty named this picture “The Hidden Tiger“, your assignment is to figure out why! When you find it – comment, just don’t reveal the secret, so other users can have fun spotting it too.