r/opticalillusions

Idk if this counts, but which did you see first? A smiley face with bear ears or a frog face? Or neither, or both?

u/Nowaaaa_bb — 23 hours ago

LED or REAL Sunflower?

Nope, that’s a real sunflower illuminated by a hidden ray of sunshine.

Was talking to my coworker behind the cafe bar, then got distracted by this glowing flower. I ask her, “bro did we get a new LED sunflower?” She confusingly said idfk. At that moment I had to step closer to investigate. A ray of sunshine hitting the sunflower made it seem like it was glowing!! Such a beautiful trick of nature to the human eye. I was grateful to witness it and share the illusion with all the customers!

u/Large_Eye991 — 2 days ago
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At first glance, he looks like an elephant seal

It was the first thing that popped into my head right after youtube loaded up. I mean, if you think about it, his cape's the body, the foot's a flipper and his head is the nose.

The arm sorta looked like the bottom jaw, but his hand falters the appearance a little.

u/The-Crazy-Master — 2 days ago
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this effect always scares me. its caused by a telephoto (long focal length) lens, and the phenomenon itself is called lens compression

It's common in horror movies where a pursuer or threat in the background looks unnervingly close to the character in the foreground. it creates a sense of being "boxed in" or trapped, since the compressed space feels smaller and more claustrophobic.

its often paired with a slow dolly/track where the camera moves while the compression stays extreme, which warps depth even further and feels disorienting.

u/Zu_Qarnine — 3 days ago
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All the noise textures are physically identical

The black (white) parts of the texture stand out more on a white (black) background. This effect, discovered by psychologist Bart Anderson, is related to the Munker-Benary-White effect, where solid gray regions of identical luminance appear either whitish and blackish. It's a vivid demonstration of the influence of boundary conditions (contrast polarity) on textural figure–ground layer segmentation. Are there any known computer vision algorithms that can segment textures into figure–ground layers in this fashion?

u/therealrealvlad21 — 2 days ago

The Dress: It's both blue/black and white/gold and this photo proves it

I found this photo that proves that The Dress can be seen both ways, depending on the lighting.

EDIT: If you have trouble seeing it one way other the other, just cover the part of the dress in shadow or bright illumination (depending on whether you see blue/black or gold/white).

The point is that what you perceive depends on your "frame of reference", meaning which parts of the dress you perceive as being in "plain view". The regions seen in plain view are taken by your visual system as being "diagnostic" of the colour of the underlying material. So there's a type of "principle of relativity" at work here.

The weird part is that different folks adopt different reference frames as their "default" and it can be really hard to switch frames. I myself have literally never perceived the whole dress as anything other than gold and white. But this picture clearly demonstrates how it is POSSIBLE to perceive it either way!

I can elaborate with many other examples, if folks are interesting. I've even got an entire book on the topic coming out next month, which I'm happy to link to if folks want to go down the rabbit hole. It's called The Appearance of Things: How the Principle of Relativity Shapes Our Visual World https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HCVLM6T9

u/therealrealvlad21 — 4 days ago

Unknown RGB light appear in clouds

This is the part 2 of unknown RGB colour sudden appear in clouds near my house please comment what happened

u/Dry_Book6087 — 3 days ago