Is this magic or an illusion? How do these LEGO Minifigs drive their car through the train station’s solid brick wall?
The first place winner of 2023’s Best Illusion of the Year Contest, Platform 9 3/4s by Matt Prichard, uses a long-used perspective technique to trick our vision. Watch the first 14 seconds of the video to see the illusion; the trick is revealed immediately after. Spoilers abound.
“The reality is there is a car sized hole in the middle of the wall for toy to drive through. The missing brick work is replaced by an anamorphic illusion on the floor behind the wall. When viewed from one perspective, the vertical bricks and horizontal bricks line up and appear to be one solid wall. The pattern camouflages the edges and makes it extremely hard to distinguish any discontinuities.”
John Salmon also plays on these visual assumptions to create his mind-blowing second place-winner: Tower of Cubes illusion. Below, three 3D-printed cubes are placed on top of each other, imitating the tower on the right.
“Once assembled a straight wooden stick is driven through the left tower from the top to bottom. The stick is likewise pushed through the tower of cubes on the right but now appears to bend around the structure in a surprising and impossible manner. The illusion is resolved by disassembling the tower on the right revealing warped 3D-printed cubes that are anything but perfect.”
Watch closely at the end of the video as Salmon reassembles the warped cubes back into the tower.
Third place went to Wendy van Boxtel for her Cornelia illusion, an accomplishment that will look famaliar to anyone who has seen this Hollow Mask Illusion video.
“After discovering hollow face illusions, I was obsessed to create an inside out sculpture where the face and hair gradually emerges into the painting this to create a custom illusion that make people stare. I experimented with many materials, colors and depth, after lots of attempts I found a method that worked.”
And a TKSST honorable mention…
Similar to his exploration of confounding shapes plus mirrors illusions, including Ambiguous Cylinder Illusion and Triply Ambiguous Object, mathematics professor Kokichi Sugihara created One Way Flight.
“An ordinary object facing toward a mirror, when reflected in a mirror, changes its orientation to the opposite with respect to the mirror surface. Our objects, however, just translate into the mirror without changing their orientations. This illusion is strong in the sense that the illusion does not disappear even if we change our viewpoint in a certain area.”
This illusion is a twist on his Impossible Arrow illusion.
Sugihara won the contest’s first place in 2010 and 2013, second place in 2015 and 2016, and first place again in 2018 and 2020. TKSST has more of his illusion videos here, including these impossible motion illusions.
Then watch these related illusion videos on TKSST:
• The mathematics of sidewalk illusions
• The Writing’s on the Wall – OK Go
• How to make amazing anamorphic illusions
• Quirkology’s 10 Amazing Optical Illusions (and how to make them)
• How to make a Hollow Mask Illusion
And the not-to-be-missed classic: The roller skating scene from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.
h/t Kottke.
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