The green circle in the center of this image, which Professor Akiyoshi Kitaoka calls a “watermelon”, appears to sway back and forth and be unstable against the gray background.  I personally find this image to be difficult to look at for too long.  This one actually makes my eyes hurt!

Another good example of this same effect can be found by viewing the Mona Lisa Moving Face Illusion.

(via Akiyoshi Kitaoka)

The device featured in this video is quite interesting.  Depending on which setting is chosen, water droplets appear to be stationary, falling, or moving in an upward direction.  In reality, the water is falling down as a steady stream exactly as you would expect it to behave.  Inside the box, however, there are a series of strobe lights.  The frequency of the strobes flashing makes the water appear to behave in different ways.  If the strobe lights flash at a specific rate, then the droplets appear to be hovering.  By making adjustments to the timing of the strobe lights, the drops can be made to have the appearance of moving up or down.  I wouldn’t mind having one of these in my office.

Photographer Jan von Holleben created this piece for the internal magazine of a major notorious power company.  The recognizable symbol for recycling is made completely from trash and other discarded items.  In the article for the magazine, Holleben illustrated the travels of waste and its sticky handling within the European Union.  He points out that data from 2013 suggests that each person living in the European Union generates, on average, about 481 kilograms (1,060 pounds – or more than half a ton!) of waste each year.

(via Jan von Holleben)

Today’s image is a new hidden image stereogram from Gene Levine.  Stare at the colorful pattern and a secret image will emerge.  Can you see it?  What is it?

If you are having trouble viewing the stereogram, please read these 3D stereogram viewing tips.

(via Eyetricks 3D Stereograms)

I recently came across some exceptional anamorphic 3D lettering works created by Tolga Girgin.  In the example below, which he calls ‘Cream’, the letters of the word are drawn on a flat sheet of paper using a parallelpen & brushpen and a pencil.  It looks as if the letters of the word CREAM are hovering above the page.  The liquid dripping from the bottom of each letter and pooling on the paper add to the three-dimensional effect.

(via Tolga Girgin)

In this video, Brazilian visual artist and photographer Vik Muniz shares his process for creating intricate collages based on images that “are already part of our collective visual memory.”   This series, titled “Pictures of Magazines”, features his replica of Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” from hand-torn scraps from magazines.

Muniz was featured in 2010’s documentary Waste Land, which was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 83rd Academy Awards.  It did not win (it got beat by a film about the financial crisis in the late-2000s), but it shows his art works created from trash found at one of the largest garbage dumps in the world located just outside of Rio de Janeiro.  If you haven’t seen this documentary yet, I would highly recommend that you watch it.  The beauty that Muniz is able to generate from discarded items is quite impressive… and the garbage dump is enormous!

Karlos Calonge Domenech sent me this impossible construction he created a few weeks ago.  The way that many of the angles line up on this odd structure could simply not exist.  I count a total of three impossible rectangles incorporated into the design.  Do you see them all?

If you’ve got any optical illusions that you’ve created, please forward them over so that we can post them on An Optical Illusion.