Cool Optical Illusions Blog

This is another example of using an optical illusion to work to your advantage as an advertiser. People are presented with thousands of advertising messages every day, and to stand out, you need something that is so interesting that people want to learn more, even it’s a boring subject.

Well this picture shows exactly that! It looks like a guy is hanging on the back of the bus! The Bus says “Hanging on ’til pay day?’ and has some type of mannequin stuck on the back of the bus, or perhaps it is painted on there with the correct shadows? You be the judge.

Either way, it stand out in your mind, and you’ll be thinking about this the next day, which is exactly what the advertiser intended. Couldn’t this marketing concept be used somewhere else? Sure it could, as long as people don’t get to accustomed to this type of thing!

What do you think of this? Make a comment below!

This is just a pleasing art illusion. What the artist has done is taken blocks of plastic or foam and cut out the shapes of cats looking at birds. Then, what is cut out is placed on top of the blocks.

And then, to make the art functional, he sells it as bookshelves. Wouldn’t this be a cool bookshelf in an elementary school, or a little art deco for your hip apartment?

Now, the artist could have made a bit more of an optical illusion out of this by filling the gaps between the cats with another shape. If you look at the two cats facing each other, it almost looks like a bat. The artist could have slightly modified the design so that it really did look like a bat or a bird, thus showing that the elusive bird always gets away.

And it’s not only bookshelves, there are some chairs too. Very fun. Perfect for a kids room!

I always like understated tshirts. I’d have to be paid a lot of money to wear an I’m with Stupid t-shirt, but here’s one that I think I could get away with. It’s a picture of a turtle on a tshirt. The illusion is subtle, there is some shading on the shirt that looks like the turtle is trying to climb up the shirt.

That’s really all there is to this illusion. It’s not going to give you a headache or make you stare at it for awhile. But sometimes that’s the best kind of illusion. Just a simple addition to an already interesting concept. Without the fake wrinkles, this would have been just another tshirt. But because of the optical illusion, it made it super-cool!

I don’t usually just hand out sponsorships to websites, but the nice people at Neural Correlate sponsor an optical illusions contest every year. We’ve been amazed by some of the illusions in the past, and this year we decided to be an official sponsor of the contest. They feature about the top 10 illusions of the contest, however we’d like to see them all!

I’m noticing that their website is down right now, must be because of all the traffic we sent them! Hah! So you may want to try this link a little later in the week, when they fix their webhosting.

Just search for “2007 optical illusion contest”. And look for our logo on the sponsors page!

I found this while looking for ideas for a home theater system, and this picture just seemed to smile at me. Doesn’t it look like it’s smiling back at you?

Alright, I’m going to hit you with another one that is great. Don’t you just feel like you’re getting smarter knowing stuff like this is out there? In this video, there is a steady drip of liquid into a pool below. Now if you’ve ever seen a strobe light hit the shower (don’t ask me how I know this!) you know that individual drops can be illuminated and the end effect is pretty cool.

But this optical illusion video takes it a step farther, because they actually time the dots to slow time down, or so it seems. My cousin sent me this illusion video months ago, and now that I have this blog for you all, I thought I’d post it to show how great it is.

Matthew, from Golden Colorado sent this one in to me. These cups aren’t transparent! That’s noses painted on the sides of the cups. Wouldn’t these make some great cups for a party? There are all different sizes, shapes, and types of noses, including some that look pretty, and some that have warts and are completely like a witch nose.

How fun! Please send in more illusions, and send in your comments!

This is a very cool visual effect. A great optical illusion. It looks like this is the good old “penrose triangle” or “impossible triangle”, but this time it is made out of dice! This is possible to make one of these, it would just take some glue and a camera from just the right angle, but it is very hard to tell exactly where it might break in real life.

Anyone want to comment and guess how this is done?

Well, the results of the contest are in, and we have selected the winner of the Cool Optical Illusions logo design contest. Mukesh Panchal was the winner, and did a fantastic job. There were also some other entries to the contest that were also absolutely fantastic, but of course, we can pick only one winner.

So here it is, without further ado, the new logo:

You’ll soon see this logo throughout the site, but it’ll take awhile to update all the pages. In the meantime, check out the other optical illusions throughout the site.

Did you know, you are just reading the blog of coolopticalillusions.com. If you go to coolopticalillusions.com you’ll see a huge collection of optical illusions pictures.

This is also pretty neat. The way this car has been painted on to the side of the subway doors, it looks like the people inside are riding in the car. Kind of a fun advertisement for a this blue car, and you gotta give it to the advertisers for turning something that would normally be pretty drab - the doors of a subway, into something interesting for people to think about on their way home.

We’ve seen similar illusions inside the main site of Cool Optical Illusions, with plumbers and race cars and even buses, but now we can add a subway illusion to the list! (Click the thumbnail image to view the larger picture)