Friday 27 July 2012

Optical Illusions

In this task, we were told to make simple optical illusions and talk about them.

So i started with a research on the internet to see a few samples that i will try working on and create my own optical illusion. These are a few of the illusions that i had got from the net and also to try to make a choice of what i can further expand and make my own illusion.



These are the samples of illusions that i had obtained from the internet.


  1. The first one was a clearly type of illusion that is mixed with alot of colors and a simple design that makes the illusion of the image moving when it is clearly a still image. This type of illusion is called a pulsating optical illusion.
  2. The second one was an illusion with boxes and it gave out an effect of seeing grey dots where the boxes would end.
  3. The last illusion was a drawn type of illusion. This illusion at first hand looks like there are only two dogs in the picture but if you looked closely, you would see that they are actually 4 dogs in the picture sharing the same head and the number of legs to give the first impression of only two dogs.
So with these illusions that i had collected, i had a rough idea of the type of illusion that i can work and create  simply and still have the illusion effect. So out of the types above, i picked number 2. The square illusion which i was going to work and in a way, create my own type of illusion.

To make this illusion, i used a software called Adobe Illustrator. I created the same design and layout of the squares and the spaces with the same color. But, to make it more interesting i tried a mix of colors to see what colors of the 'dots' i would get instead of the primary grey dots. So i played with the colors and i finally found two colors that gave me another dot color. These colors were red squares and a yellow background, the mixture of these colors to the eyes would give out orange colored dots in the spaces. This is the image below.


Looking closely at this image, just looks like simple red boxes that are infront of a yellow background, not until you look closely and notice that they are actually three colors in this image. And that color is seen to be orange and that orange is given out in dots that are caused by an illusion.
To broaden my optical illusion and maybe add more detail to it because this to me looked just like copy and paste and changed colors. So instead of using squares i tried other shapes. My first was to use circles and this was this outcome :

Clearly, the was no optical illusion used. Just looked like the circles are there and no illusion effect was being given. I then realized why it didnt work and because the circle is round, it does not have any edges and sharp corners that can give it that effect to have an illusion. This type of pattern was a clear mo illusion image.

The next shape that i had tried was stars. This also gave me an outcome like the circular pattern, same colors different shape, no effect. Even with the sharp corners that the star has, it still did not give me an optical illusion of the dots. I used different colors on both images but still could not attain any illusion.


Can see above that the both images didnt have the same optical illusion as the first one. So to make my illusion idea work with more shapes. I played around with my first idea which just had squares, and i took this to transform the same squares and transformed them into triangles. This was going to give me the same effect but one would not only think that they are squares inside the image but triangles. 



As you can see from the image above, i changed the normal looking squares and then cut them into half to form equally shaped triangles which gave out out the same illusion but again with creativity and not cutting at the same angle, i cut and mirrored the triangles from the first and second line so that the first two of each line would give you a square, an illusion on its own to many that would not pay attention.

Hence this as my final idea, one would see the orange dots quite well but, how many squares can you see in this illusion? An illusion in an illusion it is.


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