Skip To Content
    This post has not been vetted or endorsed by BuzzFeed's editorial staff. BuzzFeed Community is a place where anyone can create a post or quiz. Try making your own!

    8 #Winning Visual Illusions You'll Have To Watch Twice

    Each year, a satellite organization of the Visual Sciences Society holds a contest for the best visual illusions of the year. Well this year's finalists have been announced and the 9th annual contest, on May 13, 2013, will showcase and debut each of these 10 new illusions that have been created and studied over the past year or so. Although these latest visual wonders won't be released by the judges until the winner is announced, we can still experience the winning illusion from each of the last 8 years. [thumbnail from: dottech.org]

    2012 -- The Disappearing Hand Trick

    View this video on YouTube

    illusionoftheyear.com

    From Illusion of the Year:

    This multi-sensory illusion uses vision, touch and position sense to create the illusion that the hand has disappeared. The felt positions of the hands are gradually adapted without the participant noticing so that the real locations of the hands end up further outwards than their perceived locations. When the right hand is removed from vision and the participant reaches across to touch it, all they can feel is the empty table. The combined loss of vision and touch creates a powerful illusion that the hand is missing and was designed to simulate loss of awareness in stroke patients.

    2011 -- Silencing Awareness to Change By Background Motion

    View this video on YouTube

    visionlab.harvard.edu

    From Harvard's Vision Lab:

    Play the movie while looking at the small white speck in the center of the ring. At first, the ring is motionless and it’s easy to tell that the dots are changing color. When the ring begins to rotate, the dots suddenly appear to stop changing. But in reality they are changing the entire time.

    2010 -- Impossible Motion

    View this video on YouTube

    illusionoftheyear.com

    From Illusion of the Year:

    In this video, wooden balls roll up the slopes just as if they are pulled by a magnet. The behavior of the balls seems impossible, because it is against the gravity. The video is not a computer graphic, but a real scene. What is actually happening is that the orientations of the slopes are perceived oppositely, and hence the descending motion is misinterpreted as ascending motion. This illusion is remarkable in that it is generated by a three-dimensional solid object and physical motion, instead of a two-dimensional picture.

    2009 -- Feature Blur and the Break of a Curveball

    2008 -- Filling in the Afterimage After the Image

    2007 -- The Leaning Tower Illusion

    2006 -- The Freezing Rotation Illusion

    View this video on YouTube

    illusionoftheyear.com

    From Illusion of the Year:

    An object (e.g. airplane) is turning on a surround (greenhouse), which is swaying back and forth. Observe the rotation of the object. Is it turning smoothly all the time? Or does it “freeze” from time to time? Convince yourself by covering the swaying surround that the object is really turning continuously. If the object is swaying back and forth and the surround is turning continuously we do not perceive a slow-down of the surround. Assuming a stable surround, our visual system probably uses the surround as a reference to measure motion of the included objects.

    2005 -- Motion-Illusion Building Blocks

    shapirolab.net

    From Illusion of the Year:

    A number of well-known motion illusions arise when luminance modulates next to a stationary edge (e.g., Anstis and Rogers, 1975; Gregory and Heard, 1983). Here, we reduce these phenomena to four novel elemental conditions and show how these conditions can be combined (like building blocks) to generate an infinite number of new illusory configurations.
    Click on the “Elemental Conditions” button in the accompanying movie . In the top two panels, the luminance of the edge modulates next to stationary black or white center fields; in the bottom two panels , the luminance of the center modulates next to black or white stationary edges (Figure 1A shows one frame of the movie). In all four conditions, the fields appear to move even though they maintain a fixed spatial position. The apparent direction of motion may seem counter-intuitive: when the luminance of a modulating edge is similar to the luminance of the center, the motion is outward, whereas when the luminance of a modulating center is similar to the luminance of the edge, the motion is inward.