Cool Visual Illusion

[photon]

The two images of the towers are the same, yet our brain sees them as leaning apart. This is from http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com though it's totally down right now. The explanation:

Here is a novel illusion that is as striking as it is simple. The two images of the Leaning Tower of Pisa are identical, yet one has the impression that the tower on the right leans more, as if photographed from a different angle. The reason for this is because the visual system treats the two images as if part of a single scene. Normally, if two adjacent towers rise at the same angle, their image outlines converge as they recede from view due to perspective, and this is taken into account by the visual system. So when confronted with two towers whose corresponding outlines are parallel, the visual system assumes they must be diverging as they rise from view, and this is what we see. The illusion is not restricted to towers photographed from below, but works well with other scenes, such as railway tracks receding into the distance. What this illusion reveals is less to do with perspective, but how the visual system tends to treat two side-by-side images as if part of the same scene. However hard we try to think of the two photographs of the Leaning Tower as separate, albeit identical images of the same object, our visual system regards them as the 'Twin Towers of Pisa', whose perspective can only be interpreted in terms of one tower leaning more than the other.

[Bobblehead]

I couldn't get to that site earlier.

Things like this are fascinating; how our mind unconciously provides a context like in this example.

[Five-hole]

Interpretation is reality.

If you concentrate on looking only at one, you can notice they're the same picture, but you can also actually feel your mind trying to pull against your vision. It's a strange feeling.

There's lots of examples of the mind filling in visual details that aren't really there. Someone who knows more about this subject than I do says it's an artifact of the necessity to cut down on the sensory information we receive, so as to only receive the most relevant information. (The survival benefits are obvious.) Things like, if there are three dots aligned as though they were 3 of the 4 points of a square, the mind "paints in" the fourth and final dot to complete the shape.

[Knut]

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Modules/.../visindex.html
-- Talks about illusions and why we see them like they are.
http://www.yorku.ca/eye/thejoy.htm
--- More in depth discussion actually getting into some the biology of things.

[SaskaBushFire]

Am I a weirdo if the two pictures look exactly the same?

[Dion]

Cool bridge:

[SteveToms]

We had a shelf at work that was level, but it had products on that were angled to show them better, man did that thing look warped LOL