Best Optical Illusion of the Year Contest 79
An anonymous reader writes "The 7th annual 'Best illusion of the year contest' was held by the Neural Correlate Society last week in Florida, and it featured 10 fantastic visual illusions selected from a pool of over 150 submissions. The site has demos of the illusions that made the finals, with brief explanations about what each illusion tells us about the visual system. Some might be important for the design of video displays and animations."
And the winner is... (Score:4, Funny)
The imaginary webpage!
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It's this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjMVsTFVX10 [youtube.com]
I don't think we can slashdot youtube :).
Anyway, I find if I shift some attention to the dots while looking at the centre dot, even though the whole thing rotates I can still notice that the dots are changing colour.
It is normally more important for the brain to notice that the "whole thing is rotating together" than the dots changing colour. The big picture is more important.
That said, I'm not so sure about how the "loch ness aftereffect " one works
Quicktime? (Score:2, Insightful)
There's no fucking way I'm installing that fucking Apple shit on my PC, no matter how cool the optical illusions are.
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Agreed, Quicktime player has to be one of the worst things ever, irrespective of the codec.
Re:Quicktime? (Score:4, Insightful)
Very true for Windows. On a Mac it works fine.
Not that that is at all surprising... but I am a little surprised Apple doesn't make its Windows version better, seeing as Quicktime is the only computer-related Apple product many people come in contact with. It made me think poorly of them for years, until I actually used a Mac and found it to be better.
Re:Quicktime? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that I believe that, but to a layperson it might appear that way.
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In my experience most users don't even realise that there is an alternative. iTunes is just what you use to manage your iOS device, the same as most phones come with their own crapware even when you can just copy files via Explorer. Same with printers, people just assume you have to install the stupid monitor program and assorted shovelware on the disc to make it work.
Most people are pretty much at the mercy of software developers.
Similarly back when I worked in the field a few years back a lot of people ha
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I've never found fault with Quicktime on OS X for watching anything, at least as long as Perian is installed.
VLC, on the other hand, is horrid.
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Yeah but let's be fair, who the heck uses Windows anyway? /he types, from Windows
Re:Quicktime? (Score:5, Funny)
Yea man. I am sticking to Adobe flash.
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It's at least 100 times better, which says a lot about Quicktime.
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Flash? 100 time better? On what planet?
Re:Quicktime? (Score:4, Insightful)
On the one when you're comparing Flash on Windows to Quicktime on Windows. If you're making the comparison on OSX it goes the other way. However, Quicktime literally runs on nothing but Windows and MacOS, so Flash wins big in lots of other places, too since Quicktime doesn't bother to show up. If you want to reach the absolute maximum number of device you use Flash. On Windows it uses acceleration well and on Linux with nVidia we also get acceleration that brings flash into the realm of reason. As a user of contemporary hardware there is no other reasonable choice for Linux unless you don't want to use your GPU for anything.
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sticking to Adobe flash
That <video> tag isn't becoming standardized and widely supported fast enough...
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Last Year's Winner (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAXm0dIuyug [youtube.com]
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Oh no you don't. You're trying to trick me into thinking it's not Rick Astley so I will click on it.
Ha.
here is a better link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ [youtube.com]
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Ha! Rickroll interrupted by Youtube advertisement.
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Wow. That's pretty awesome, and after getting this year's page to load and seeing how crappy the entries are it's very awesome--only the first 2 of this year's entries were even mildly interesting, while last year's winner is fantastic.
Speaking of images nobody'll believe... (Score:5, Funny)
Yesterday I ran across a visual I had to blink a few times to comprehend... Linky... [slashdot.org]
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Thank you Slashdot for finally fixing the feeds and the sidebox alignment. It was getting really annoying! Now, if I could only convince work to punt IE...
You only THOUGHT ... (Score:1)
... they were in Florida.
Sony's Entry? (Score:5, Funny)
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This contest was for "illusions" not "delusions"
What's the illusion here? (Score:2)
I see a fish carcass being sodomized. Am I missing it?
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Slashdot Insurance (Score:2)
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They do, but it's not called slashdot protection.
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Is that intercal in a sig?
That's awesome. Shouldn't it end with PLEASE GIVE UP?
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It's a one-liner (the shortest known algorithm to write an addition without using the standard library), not a complete program; it does nothing by itself. (I had to golf it right down to fit it in Slashdot's sig limits). It's not really recommended to do it quite like that in production code, as it uses a rather significant line number (1), and leaks all over your operand overloads without scoping them properly. It works in C-INTERCAL, and I think probably CLC-INTERCAL too, although it makes use of some r
slashdotted (Score:4, Funny)
Apparently you need a 'mirror' to view these optical illusions...
Mirror (Score:2)
http://www.networkmirror.com/hYdw3qNZFFrB_AoK/illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com/cat/top-10-finalists/2011/index.html [networkmirror.com]
Slashdotted (Score:1)
Mirrors anyone?
Re:Slashdotted (Score:4, Informative)
A great example (Score:4, Interesting)
of how the mind will make leaps and conclusion with minimal input.
Optical illusions are a great opportunity to teach people how to think rational about something that on initial view doesn't make sense or breaks reality.
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LoB
Slashdot (Score:2)
Making old news look new again.
a black car followed by a white car (Score:1)
TFA: The Exchange of Features, Textures and Faces - The binding problem is a fundamental issue in neuroscience. The term refers to the fact that the brain processes color, motion, and other visual features separately and in parallel, yet our perception is of a unified world, populated by coherent objects.
I've long marvelled that as I'm speeding down the freeway, a black car followed by a white car in the oncoming lane looks like a police car: a black car with a white door.
It would be nice to have animated .GIFs instead (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd rather see these as animated .GIFs instead of Flash. sigh... oh well...
(yes, the 1990s called, they want their animation back...ha ha)
The article's an entry in itself (Score:2)
Wow, that's some optical illusion. It looks like an article on optical illusions when in fact if you look really closely, it's a 502 page.
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Mirror for Third Place Winner (Score:1)
Third Place Winner is called the "Loch Ness Aftereffect"
Available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Djd218oWOGQ [youtube.com]
Higher quality version at http://lpp.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/wexlerillusion/ [univ-paris5.fr]
TSA should win... (Score:1)
Mirror for First Place Winner (Score:1)
The first place winner is called "Silencing Awareness of Change by Background Motion" and is the blinking-dots-in-a-circle illusion.
Several versions here: http://visionlab.harvard.edu/silencing/ [harvard.edu]
Mirror for Second Place Winner (Score:1)
The second place winner is called "Grouping by Contrast"
Mirror here: http://www.moillusions.com/2011/05/grouping-by-contrast.html [moillusions.com]
Look at the left hand.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Tornados and Obama meeting with the queen hides discussion of the Patriot Act from the media.
FYI all (Score:2)
It's one of the more hideous webpages I've seen since Angelfire died.
The illusions are all linked, and then the videos ARE LOWER ON THE SAME PAGE.
So when you load the page, and wait....and wait....and wait....it's loading a bunch of quicktime (ugh) videos below in large preview screens. be patient, it will eventually come up.
Wow, failsite.
Flash doesn't work for the features/textures one (Score:2)
For entry number 8, http://illusionoftheyear.com/2011/the-exchange-of-features-textures-and-faces/ [illusionoftheyear.com] , the Flash thing doesn't display properly. It says to "move the slider" but there is no slider (just a 255 that you can't alter), and there are no "Harry and Dobby" in Demo 1. The others all work fine. Tried in Firefox and IE latest versions. Have latest Flash (10.3).
Even the background image is an optical illusion (Score:2)
I love the background image up the sides of that site - that look like domino pieces of something.
Even that is a pretty cool optical illusion!
Illusions fail (Score:2)
There's a lot of fail in that series of "illusions". I'm particularly annoyed with #5, the "Mask of Love". Yeah, it's amazing how three people discovered that a blurry, low-res image is ambiguous and might look like some other blurry, low-res image. Welcome to 2400 baud pr0n, dumbasses!
I suppose, when one's career consists of selling optical illusions , after a while you start scraping the bottom of the barrel...
Hehe, cool (Score:2)
It was fun to look at all these illusions.
It was not fun to read half the comments complain about Quicktime/Flash, whereas a thread regarding the illusions anywhere else would have focused on, I dunno, discussion about the ILLUSIONS.