Gregor Wosik is a street painter with exceptional talent.  He was born in Poland but currently resides in Germany where he works as a freelance artist.  His street painting below makes it seem that a waterfall running down the center of a street.  Several other photographs, including one that shows the painting from the opposite angle can be seen in the full post.

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The orange and purple circles appear to be spinning in a counter-clockwise direction.

To see more motion illusions, be sure to check out the Beating Heart by Akiyoshi Kitaoka and the Moving Pink Square from Daniel Picon.

Today’s video arrived in my inbox courtesy of Masodo, a regular visitor to this site.  He runs a blog called BlogDogIt where he posts about a variety of things that he finds interesting.  The video features a dance routine by eight girls who use clever choreography and black & white costumes to create an ambiguous illusion.  As the routine goes on, it becomes difficult to distinguish which legs belong to which girl making their movement appear to be very odd.

If anyone has any information about who these girls are or where this dance was performed, please let us know in the comments.

In the early 20th century, psychologist Edgar Rubin developed the figure-ground vase (also known as Rubin’s vase).  This ambiguous figure can be interpreted as either a vase or two faces looking at each other.   Metal Portraits, a company based in Suwanee, Georgia, has taken the figure-ground vase concept to an entirely new level by creating metal sculptures that are the exact same size as your face.  They can be made from solid brass, stainless steel or aluminum.

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This figure, created by Peter Ulric Tse,  may be interpreted as a series of ‘pyramids’ on the ground plane (pointing upwards )or as the ‘teeth’ of a saw that face the viewer and lie flush with the ground plane.  Can you see both interpretations?  Which one did you see first?

A number of ambigrams from Michigan State University professor Punya Mishra have been featured on An Optical Illusion in the past.  I just discovered a short video that he created at the end of last year wishing everyone an outstanding 2013.  In the video, he uses a bit of anamorphic trickery to fool the viewers into seeing something that is flat as a three-dimensional object.  My only wish is that I had seen this video sooner!  Enjoy.

An impossible bottle is one that has an object (or objects) inside of it that is physically larger than the neck of the bottle.  The bottles are undamaged with everything inside of the bottle being inserted through the neck.  When viewing an impossible bottle, the only real question that you will find yourself asking is, “How exactly did they get THAT in there?”  These types of bottles have been around for a long time, but they were made popular by magician Herry Eng who passed away in 1996.   Below are a couple of examples of impossible bottles created Merlin Dunlop, operator of the Impossibottle.co.uk website.

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