Tag Archives: illusion

Take Puzzles to the Next Level with a Puzzly Experience!

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Hey there, fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers. It’s the day after Thanksgiving, and naturally, our thoughts turn toward the upcoming holiday season. (Particularly with all the Black Friday advertising!)

Sure, we could use this opportunity to talk about our Holiday Puzzly Gift Guide, which went live Tuesday and features all sorts of marvelous games, puzzles, and products.

We could also talk about our fantastic lineup of apps, from Daily POP Crosswords and the Penny Dell Crosswords App to Penny Dell Sudoku and Classic Word Search. Of course we could do that.

But instead, today we’d like to talk about puzzly experiences.

If you’re looking for an engaging and interactive puzzly adventure to share with the puzzlers in your life, there are all sorts of options available to you.

There are yearly puzzle hunts like BAPHL, the Boston Area Puzzle Hunt League. There are crossword tournaments like Lollapuzzoola and the Indie 500 (plus local ones all over the country!). Murder mystery dinners, scavenger hunts… not only are there places that host all of these, but there are even kits available online that let you host your own!

More Escape Rooms pop up every year — from Breakin Escape Rooms in London to our friends at Escape 101 in Connecticut — and one near you is just a Google search away.

But there’s one particular puzzly experience I want to highlight as an option for you this holiday season.

Magician and crossword constructor David Kwong is launching a one-of-a-kind puzzle experience, The Enigmatist, at the High Line Hotel in New York City during the month of January.

Advertised as “an immersive evening of puzzles, cryptology and illusions,” the show is based on the experiences of William and Elizebeth Friedman’s work at Riverbank, a peculiar hotbed for codebreaking in the early days of the twentieth century.

David is a master at melding the world of puzzles with illusions, magic, and sleight of hand, deftly employing both humor and skill to wow audiences, and I expect he has outdone himself with this show.

The Enigmatist sounds like a unique and amazing puzzly experience, and if you’re interested, you can get tickets here.

For full details, visit the Enigmatist website. I think the show will be something truly special.

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The Curvature Blindness Illusion Strikes!

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Optical illusions are puzzles for the eye. They reveal how different combinations of images — light and shadow, shape and density, foreground and background — can trick viewers into seeing something unexpected.

And we are still discovering new illusions that deceive and delight us.

In the above image, pairs of wavy lines run horizontally across the screen. In the white and black corners, they’re fine. But in the gray area, half of those wavy lines suddenly look like zigzags.

The only difference? The alternating pattern of light and dark patches on each line. In lines where the peaks of the waves are dark and the valleys are light, the wavy pattern remains.

But when the dark and light patches are the ascending and descending parts of the wave, our eyes interpret them as lines forming corners instead of wavy lines.

This is known as the curvature blindness illusion.

As with many optical illusions, this is all about contrast. The white and black backgrounds allow you to view the alternating pieces as one continuous wavy line, whereas the gray background forces you to regard those alternating pieces as individual segments.

Those individual segments are granted the illusion of three-dimensions, and our minds process the lighter ascending line and the darker descending line as “walls” forming a corner, rather than the rising and falling of a sine wave.

It’s amazing how distinctly different the pairs of lines look with just those small variations. Even knowing how I’m being manipulated, it’s still hard to convince myself that I’m not actually seeing what I’m seeing.

Very cool stuff.

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The Floor Is Not to Be Trusted.

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We love optical illusions here at PuzzleNation Blog. They’re puzzles for the eye, mind-bending ways that our senses can be tricked by clever manipulators of color, angle, and perspective.

And if you’re looking for visual trickery in flooring, look no further than the tile wizards at Casa Ceramica, a UK flooring manufacturer that decided to kill two birds with one stone. (Well, more like many tiles than one stone, but I digress.)

Supposedly, they had a problem with people running down the hallway to their store, and wanted to dissuade such shenanigans.

So they created an optical illusion to make it look like the floor was more treacherous than it really is. That way, ne’er-do-wells would be forced to slow down for their own “safety.”

And not only are they making their place safer, but they’re showing off their impressive skills while they do so! It’s a win-win.

What do you think, fellow puzzlers? Will it work? Or is it just a clever marketing scheme to draw attention to their topnotch tile skills?

Although I firmly believe it’s just an ingenious way to get the word out about their company, they’re not wrong in thinking that this sort of thing could dissuade rambunctious types. Other designers and stores have employed similar trickery in the past.

I mean, if you were trying to get across this floor, would you risk running?

I think not.

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Visual Video Trickery!

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illusion1

Visual trickery plays an important role in puzzles. It can be the clever rebus that challenges you to find the words each image represents, or a visual brain teaser that forces you to think outside the box.

But nowhere in the realm of puzzles is visual trickery more obvious or more disconcerting than in optical illusions. Some are simple, like the famous old woman/young woman image above (or this hilarious video version). But others are not only more complex, they’re absolutely mind-bending.

Few optical illusions are as effective as those done on video. Drawings and photos are all well and good, but incorporating movement and performance into the illusion are something else entirely.

And stop-motion animator Kevin Parry has some doozies in his Instagram feed.

Check out this one involving a mirror and a wooded area. I’ve watched it a half-dozen times and I haven’t figured it out yet:

He’s also a dab hand at forced perspective illusions, as he shows in this video with a can of soda:

With innovators like Kevin at work, we will never run short of visual wonders, that’s for sure.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

The art (and science) of optical illusions

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Visual trickery plays an important role in puzzles. It can be the clever rebus that challenges you to find the words each image represents, or a visual brain teaser that forces you to think outside the box.

But nowhere in the realm of puzzles is visual trickery more obvious or more disconcerting than in optical illusions. Some are simple, like the famous old woman/young woman image above (or this hilarious video version). But others are not only more complex, they’re absolutely mind-bending.

And if we’re talking mind-bending optical illusions, at some point, you have to mention the work of Akiyoshi Kitaoka.

[Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s “A Bulge,” featuring nothing but squares.]

Dr. Kitaoka is a professor of psychology at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan, and he has extensively studied biology and psychology. He has quickly emerged as a modern master of optical illusions, utilizing not only shapes and color gradients to trick the eye, but also to simulate motion in a static image!

Two of the techniques frequently cited in his work with illusions are perceptual transparency and visual completion. Both rely heavily on how our brain and eye process the incredible amount of information we perceive every second of every day.

This is probably the most famous example of a visual completion illusion:

Basically, our brain employs mental shortcuts in order to simplify the information. For instance, visual completion (also known as filling-in) occurs when information unavailable to the eye is assumed to be there and mentally added by the brain.

Perceptual transparency, on the other hand, involves how we can perceive one surface behind another.

Check out this amazing photo from a published paper on perceptual transparency, entitled Zen Mountains:

[The mountains in the background look transparent,
even appearing to overlap each other in impossible ways.]

Dr. Kitaoka’s illusions utilize visual shortcuts and processes such like these, but his most famous creations involve a perceptual technique known as the Fraser-Wilcox Illusion, which involves using lighter and darker gradients of black and white in order to trick the eye into perceiving motion. Essentially, moving from dark to light gradually creates the illusion of motion.

Kitaoka’s work, however, maximizes this effect by employing contrasting color schemes in order to challenge the eye further.

Feast your eyes upon “Rotating Snakes,” Kitaoka’s most diabolical optical illusion:

[For the full effect, click the image and
scroll down for a full-screen version!]

By employing color as well, the rotation illusion is even more striking. In all honesty, I can’t look at it too long or my stomach starts to feel a little off-kilter!

Similarly, Kitaoka tricks the eye into perceiving waves rolling diagonally over this quilt-like sheet in “Primrose’s Field:”

As we understand more about the eye and how it perceives the visual stimuli it receives, as well as more about the brain and how it processes information, I suspect we’ll be able to craft even more convincing, mind-blowing, and unnerving examples of visual sleight of hand.

And undoubtedly, Akiyoshi Kitaoka will be leading the way.

Many thanks to Dr. Kitaoka for granting permission for me to feature three of his illusions in this post. You can check out more of his amazing work on his website, as well as some of his books on Amazon here!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!