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optical illusions

Pop Culture

Bizarre optical illusion has people either seeing a car door or the beach

What do you see?

Photos combined from Pixabay.

Car door and the beach.

Ancient sage Obi-Wan Kenobi once remarked, "Your eyes can deceive you, don't trust them." Well, he's right, kinda.

Our eyes bring in information and it's our brain's job to decipher the image and determine what we're seeing. But our brains aren't always correct. In fact, sometimes they can be so wrong we wonder if we are accurately interpreting reality at all.

After all, our brain can only label things if it knows that they are. If you lived on a deserted island your whole life and a cow showed up on the beach, you'd have no idea what to label it.

The latest baffling image that's making people across the internet doubt their senses is a picture tweeted out by Twitter user nayem. "If you can see a beach, ocean sky, rocks and stars then you are an artist," the comment reads.

But some people who see it also think it looks like a car door. What do you see?

beach, car door, rusty door

Beach or a rusty door?

via nxyxm / Twitter

If your brain told you the picture is of a lovely evening laying on the beach then you're definitely an optimist. But, according to the person who posted it, the photo is of the bottom of a rusted out car door. Not very romantic, is it?

art, comedy, sense of humor

The tweet has since gone viral, earning over 5,000 likes.

via nxym /Twitter

Here's what Twitter users thought about the illusion.

twitter trolls, twitter responses, twitter fights

Yum.

via Twitter.

This guy must be hungry.

viral images, social media, common questions

A clever call back.

via Twitter.

This guy is having flashbacks to 2015.

sense of humor, learning skills, spacial relationships

Knowing the difference through skills.

via Twitter.

Your perception determines your reality.

artist, imagination, speculation

Drawing skills.

via Twitter.

This guy explains it perfectly.

creative thoughts, community, Twitter chat

Boat on the beach.

via Twitter.

This guy has a great imagination.


This article originally appeared on 8.16.21

From Your Site Articles
comedy
Pop Culture

Trippy optical illusion makes people swear a Coke can is red. It's not. At all.

Try to make your brain NOT see the can as red.

Photo by Jeanson Wong on Unsplash

We know Coca-Cola cans are red, but that's not why it looks red in a viral optical illusion.

Optical illusions are wild. We can look at an image and swear up and down we see one thing, only to find out what we're seeing isn't what we're actually seeing at all.

Some optical illusions regularly go viral, like the not-really-two-dogs photo or the cat going up or down stairs drawing or the moving Van Gogh painting. (And we all remember the debates over "the dress," right?)

One that's making the rounds now is an image that appears to be a pixelated photo of someone holding a Coca-Cola can. The colors are muted, but the can definitely looks red.

But it's not.

In reality, the only visible colors in this image are black, white and teal (or cyan).

from woahdude

Seriously, zoom in.

Trippy, right? There's a similar version that uses a more stripey pixelation:

And there's another version made out of black, white and yellow that makes the Coke can appear blue (negating the idea that our brain is automatically making the can red because it's the color our brain expects it to be).

Again, no blue in this image when you zoom in. There's only black, white and yellow.

So what exactly is going on here?

It's the complicated way our colors work and the way our eyes perceive and process them in our brains. Here's how one Reddit user explained it when someone claimed the white in the Coke can wasn't really white:

"It is white. This is an example of simultaneous color contrast, a phenomenon that occurs when two adjacent colors influence one another, changing your perception of the colors. The cones in your eyes make it seem like it is pink. Cones give your eyes good color vision but can also play tricks with your brain, hence why from a distance, ie not zoomed in, the color appears pink and why you see the can of Coke as “red” even though there is no red in the image.

Essentially, the way your eyes see color in the first place is by contrasting it with other colors."

Another commenter verified that the white is, in fact, pure white. "The pixel color on the white is: #FFFFFF which means pure white. If there were any red in there we would see a variation on it like #FFFEFE. It is not a trick. It really is pure white," they wrote. "I too thought it might be a compression trick. Nope. Our brains just be weird."

Indeed, our brains do be weird.

Photographer and filmmaker Jared Bendis explained it in another way with a demonstration of the "Retinex effect," also known as color constancy. Essentially, because our eyes have to recognize color in varying kinds and amounts of light (otherwise how would we find food at different times of day), our brain is excellent at filling in blanks. How it works is rather complicated, so Bendis shows how it works using a photo of a bowl of fruit.

Our brains may be weird, but also very cool.

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optical illusions
Pop Culture

A popular optical illusion with a mindbending twist proves we can't trust our senses

Mind. Blown.

Curiosity Show/YouTube

The Ames window trick.

Optical illusions are universally beloved for how they trick our brains and blow our minds. There's a reason we enjoy magic shows and Escher paintings and are mesmerized by fake oases in the desert. We love seeing things that bend our perceptions of reality, and the science behind the magic always proves fascinating as well.

The Ames window is a pretty well-known optical illusion, but it's always cool to see. When spun, the angled window appears to oscillate back and forth instead of spin all the way around. But this video adds a twist that makes the effect even more mindbending—our brains simply can't process objective reality mixed with an optical illusion.


The YouTube channel Curiosity Show explains the science of the illusion and gives a DIY demonstration for making your own Ames window. But wait until the pen gets taped to the window and spun. This is some real-life magic right here. Mind. Blown.


This article originally appeared on 02.21.20

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science
Pop Culture

Scarlett Johansson's mom 'vanishing' from red carpet in weird optical illusion, explained

It really does look like she just *poof* disappears.

@crazyclipsonly/X

The woman behind Scarlett Johansson appears to disappear into thin air.

Optical illusions never fail to fascinate us, whether they're purposeful mind tricks or accidental photos that make something look like something it's not.

Video optical illusions are trickier than images because anyone can edit a video to make something appear to be something it's not. But occasionally a genuine video illusion comes along that forces our brains to stretch beyond what our eyes are perceiving, which is exactly what happened at a red carpet even in 2006.

In the video, Scarlett Johansson is stopped by a reporter and begins chatting about her dress and the highlight of the awards show. As Johansson speaks, people are seen milling about behind her. A woman in a strapless black dress walks behind her and then seems to disappear completely, as the man who was following the woman reappears on the other side of Johansson, but the woman doesn't.

Even the woman's shadow disappears, and slowing down the video doesn't make it any less wild to witness.

Watch:

Johannson, who apparently hadn't seen the video before, explained to Jimmy Fallon in November of 2023 that the woman in the video is actually her mother.

"I've been looking for her for the past 15 years!" she joked.

So what's the deal? Did ScarJo's mom slip into some kind of vortex or portal to an alternate universe or something?

As with every optical illusion, there's an explanation. For this one, the easiest way to understand it is by looking at the scene from a different angle.

Johansson's mom just happened to stop at exactly the right spot to be hidden by her daughter and at just the right depth where it's hard to see that the man following her actually walked right past her.

It seems so clear from this other perspective, but even knowing that's what happened, it's still hard to watch the original video and not feel like it's a magic trick of some sort. That's what makes optical illusions so much fun, though. Our brains create a reality based on what our eyes perceive, not on what is actually happening.

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