Optical Illusions

In the previous RGB test it didn't quite work out and I considered looking into optical illusions as mentioned before. I looked at some illusions but they didn't quite fit into what we're doing. Most of them involved staring at a dot so that the illusion could work, which is what we don't want. There were some very amazing paintings that don't form its shape for you unless you're at a specific perspective, these are called anamorphic paintings. However, one particular illusion is relevant to what we are trying to achieve.




In this video (brusspup, 2010) an animated optical illusion is shown where black bars move across black lines, filling in the gaps to give the illusion of a moving image from a still image. I thought this might be useful because it captures what I think animation is very clearly; an illusion where images flick by so quickly that your brain tells you it's moving.

It can also be made in 3D as shown by this product designed by John Leung (2011).


I've seen some like this before where the bars are printed on another layer a certain distance away from the bottom layer. Then when you move around, it appears as though it is animated as your perspective changes. This neat rug and coffee table uses the same concept.

At the time of looking at this type of optical illusion it was intended to replace the RGB light that didn't give the best results. However, after talking to Andy about it as a group we found that it was the RGB light that I had before that pulls all our components together into a package. So the focus should be how we should use what we've got and see what we can do with it. I did more testing with different colours and there were more printed colours that do pair up with certain colours of light. There aren't enough for a full length, complex animation, but there are more than enough to do one of these optical illusion animations. In the next post I'll go into more detail about the presentation and the new RGB light test I did.


Reference List

brusspup. (2010, May 30). Amazing Animated Optical Illusions! [Video file].
       Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq1ms2JhYBI&feature=related 
Leung, J. [johnleungdesign]. (2011, November 25). Magic Carp-pet @ Red Dot Design Award 2011 [Video file]. 
       Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua7HOX32PGA