General A Simple Illusion that Completely Screws Up Your Sense of Space

The Helper

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The Cafe Wall Illusion is so simple, it's also called the Kindergarten Illusion. It's a combination of color, line, and tiling, and it completely screws up people's spatial reasoning.

Plenty of people probably knew about this illusion before, but the credit for officially describing it goes to Richard Gregory, a psychologist in the 1970s. A member of his staff, clearly bored, noticed that a nearby café wall had an alternating tile configuration that made the lines between the tiles look crazily tilted. Since it's actually very hard to make irregular tiling and relatively easy to use blocks and parallel lines — and since everyone in the office was probably bored — they investigated further and found that all the lines on the wall were perfectly parallel to each other. They just appeared tilted at strange angles.

This is the Cafe Wall Illusion. When alternating bricks of black and white are stacked in a pattern any more ambiguous than a checkerboard, the lines between them seem tilted towards each other. What makes it work? We're not sure. But we know what makes it not work.

If the bricks are done in colors of equal brightness, the illusion breaks down entirely. So, if the black and white tiles shown were to be swapped for strong shades of red and blue, we wouldn't see any tilt. That's not to say it doesn't work with colored tiles — just that it works only when bright and dark are contrasted. Also, the difference between the top set of bricks and the bottom, on the illusion shown to the left, is the color of the "mortar" between them. If the lines between them are gray, the lines appear far more tilted than they do if the lines are black.

 
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Accname

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What exactly are the "news" beyond this article?
Its interesting and stuff, but the 70's are long over?
 

The Helper

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What are you the News Nazi accname? I thought it was interesting so I posted it.
 

jonadrian619

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Good grief, just because it's called "News" doesn't mean it has to cover an event (a current event at that) and that's it. It can be trivia, interesting articles from the get-go, etc.

Well, there are worse illusions out there. One example is in the spoiler, but don't stare at it for too long :p

YMQcBVvbU5k.jpg

Tell me how you feel after staring at its center for 10 seconds.
 

KaerfNomekop

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Here's another interesting one.
super_duper_illusion.gif
Cover up the center, and the dots appear to speed up. Cup your fingers and look at the center, and the dots inside slow down, while the dots outside zoom past.
 

Accname

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What are you the News Nazi accname? I thought it was interesting so I posted it.
Gas the article! Its an order!

[...]
Well, there are worse illusions out there. One example is in the spoiler, but don't stare at it for too long :p

YMQcBVvbU5k.jpg

Tell me how you feel after staring at its center for 10 seconds.
This is actually the best optical illusion i have seen so far, i really like this picture.

Do you dare to open the SPOILER?
di-0P8G.gif
Thats not so hard if english is not your native language. I didnt have any problems reading out the colors.
 

Fatmankev

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Good grief, just because it's called "News" doesn't mean it has to cover an event (a current event at that) and that's it. It can be trivia, interesting articles from the get-go, etc.

For the record, according to the definition of the world it needs to pertain to current events, at least in the way that we're using it. I mean, that's why it's called 'news'. 'Cuz it's new. But you know that.

The picture was cool though, and the article interesting. In your picture, what's the telephone all about? I don't get why it's there.
 

thewrongvine

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A lot of these illusions don't work too well with my because my eyes are wacky and like not... right. o_O Not sure if that's a good or bad thing.
 

FireCat

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A lot of these illusions don't work too well with my because my eyes are wacky and like not... right. o_O Not sure if that's a good or bad thing.
Well, it's a bad thing when you can't see the coolness in a optical illusion. It confuse your BRAIN a little bit. pretty cool hehe
 
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