Ascending Staircase Animation

There’s a great chance you’ve already seen something similar, or at least have a vague idea who Maurits Cornelis Escher was. In case you you haven’t, he was the famous Dutch graphic artist, most known for his impossible structures (Ascending and Descending, Relativity…) and various tessellations.

Today’s article features one of the animated variations of Escher’s Ascending and Descending. In reality it would be impossible to construct staircase similar to this one, however there have been some semi-successful examples in the past.

Let’s conduct a simple thought experiment: could you isolate the separation point, supposedly this object was actually a real-life construction instead, viewed from carefully selected angle?

19 Replies to “Ascending Staircase Animation”

    1. Well the effect isn’t that hard to create actually, I quickly made this using the GIMP (kind of free photoshop):[img]http://img69.imageshack.us/i/stripesl.png/[/img]

  1. If you look closely, he is walking backward along the near wall. This makes him descend to the start again :p

  2. This is a really clever illusion, but this poor little man has been running around on my screen all day!

  3. I believe it’s in the construction of the closest set of stairs. since it’s close it appears to be ascending when it’s actually descending… possibly both long walls are descending. Just was more obvious to me being the front wall. It’s clever use of perspectives.

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