Professor Akiyoshi Kitaoka, Faculty of Comprehensive Psychology at Ritsumeikan University, creates some of the best motion illusions out there. As such, he has been featured on An Optical Illusion on many occasions. One of his newer illusions, Moving Snakes, is presented below. What do you see? Are the purple, black, green, and yellow snakes slithering […]

Here is the latest work from professor Akiyoshi Kitaoka, who is never one to disappoint when it comes to creating innovative relative motion illusions. The orange rings in this optical illusion appear to rotate against the purple background. (via Akiyoshi Kitaoka)

Believe it or not, the Sparkle Illusion was inspired by an automobile.  You might not see a car in this image, but the basis of the pattern started with a graphic of the front grill of a Lexus.  Gene then manipulated the grill graphic to create the pattern below.  Finally, he incorporated the stars with […]

Stereogram designer Gene Levine was playing around with some different pattern designs the other night and came up with this one.  As he looked at the pattern on his monitor, he noticed that he could not get the “targets” to stop moving and that he had inadvertently created an optical illusion with apparent motion.   The […]

The two snakes appear to be in motion even though this image is completely static.  This another terrific example of an anomalous motion illusion created by Professor Akiyosh Kitaoka.  His illusions are very popular on this site, primarily because he creates some of the best motion illusions in the business. (via Akiyoshi Kitaoka)

The following video was recently awarded 1st prize for the 2016 Best Illusion of the Year Contest  This video was created by Mathew T. Harrison and Gideon P. Caplovitz from the University of Nevada Reno, USA.  They call the individual flickering dots “Gabors” and describe the effect as follows: Here we show that configurations of […]

This is an interesting motion illusion that Professor Akiyoshi Kitaoka created back in 2010.  When you simply look at it, you’ll just notice a series of different-colored square outlines.  But if you use your scroll bar and move the image up and down, something interesting happens.  As the actual image moves, the square insert also […]