Well this has to be my favourite optical illusion of all time. No matter how many times I look at it, my brain just won't comprehend

Square "A" and square "B" are the SAME colour!




Anyone else got any funky optical illusions?

Heres another one that works on a similar principal. Its not as jaw dropping as the checkers board, but its still cool!




All the diamonds are the same colour

The lines are all parallel and the squares are of course not moving.



Trippin'!



Focus on the cross and be totally amazed.



Black dot, white dot



Old people?



Identical faces, with different contrast, but we all realize which is the female one and which is the male one.

And the best one of them all:

I'm getting really into this. I've been looking up some more illusions, and I'll post the most interesting effects and its explanations here (as far as there are explanations other than the mind making wrong assumptions - assumptions necessary to process the huge amount of visual input we get):

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Blivet


A blivet, also known as a poiuyt, is an undecipherable figure, an optical illusion and an impossible object. It appears to have three cylindrical prongs at one end which then mysteriously transform into two rectangular prongs at the other end.

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Bezold Effect


The Bezold Effect is an optical illusion, named after a German professor of meteorology, Wilhelm von Bezold (1837-1907), who discovered that a color may appear different depending on its relation to adjacent colors. In the above example, the red seems lighter combined with the white, and darker combined with the black.
~This one is pretty logical IMHO. If you would increase the number of lines to, say, 1000, and zoom out a lot, you'd just see orange on the left, and dark red on the right, the same way we mix paint to get a new colour.

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Café Wall Illusion


The café wall illusion is an optical illusion, first described by Doctor Richard Gregory. He observed this curious effect in the tiles of the wall of a café at the bottom of St Michael’s Hill, Bristol. This optical illusion makes the parallel straight horizontal lines appear to be bent. To construct the illusion, alternating light and dark “bricks” are laid in staggered rows. It is essential for the illusion that each “brick” is surrounded by a layer of “mortar” (the grey in the image). This should ideally be of a color in between the dark and light color of the “bricks”.

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The Chubb Illusion


The Chubb illusion is an optical illusion wherein the apparent contrast of an object varies dramatically, depending on the context of the presentation. Low-contrast texture surrounded by a uniform field appears to have higher contrast than when it is surrounded by high-contrast texture. This was observed and documented by Chubb and colleagues in 1989.

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Ebbinghaus Illusion


The Ebbinghaus illusion is an optical illusion of relative size perception. In the best-known version of the illusion, two circles of identical size are placed near to each other and one is surrounded by large circles while the other is surrounded by small circles; the first central circle then appears smaller than the second central circle.

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Fraser Spiral Illusion


The illusion is also known as the false spiral, or by its original name, the twisted cord illusion. The overlapping black arc segments appear to form a spiral; however, the arcs are a series of concentric circles.
~Simplified: that is not a spiral, but just a few circles!

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Hermann Grid Illusion


The Hermann grid illusion is an optical illusion reported by Ludimar Hermann in 1870 while, incidentally, reading John Tyndall’s Sound. The illusion is characterised by “ghostlike” grey blobs perceived at the intersections of a white (or light-colored) grid on a black background. The grey blobs disappear when looking directly at an intersection.
~This reminds me of seeing black dots when you're dehydrated, but I assume that has a completely different explanation.

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Hering Illusion


The Hering illusion is an optical illusion discovered by the German physiologist Ewald Hering in 1861. The two vertical lines are both straight, but they look as if they were bowed outwards. The distortion is produced by the lined pattern on the background, that simulates a perspective design, and creates a false impression of depth.

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Jastrow Illusion


The Jastrow illusion is an optical illusion discovered by the American psychologist Joseph Jastrow in 1889. In this illustration, the two figures are identical, although the lower one appears to be larger.
~I'm an applied economics student and I've always been interested in marketing. This might come in handy in an add to trick people into thinking one object is larger than the other.

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Motion Illusion


One type of motion illusion is a type of optical illusion in which a static image appears to be moving due to the cognitive effects of interacting color contrasts and shape position. To properly view this effect, click the image above to see the full sized version.

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Poggendorff Illusion


The Poggendorff Illusion is an optical illusion that involves the brain’s perception of the interaction between diagonal lines and horizontal and vertical edges. It is named after Johann Poggendorff (1796-1877), a German physicist who first described it in 1860. In the image above, a straight black and red line is obscured by a grey rectangle. The blue line appears, instead of the red line, to be the same as the black one, which is clearly shown not to be the case in the second picture.

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White Illusion


White’s illusion is an optical illusion illustrating the fact that the same target luminance can elicit different perceptions of brightness in different contexts. Note, that although the gray rectangles are all of equal luminance, the ones seen in the context with the dark stripes appear brighter than the ones seen in the context with the bright stripes. Note that this effect is opposite to what would be expected from a simple physiological explanation on the basis of simultaneous contrast (in that case the rectangles sharing the long borders with the dark stripes should appear brighter).
~This also explains the checkers board illusion Netnerd started with and is pretty much the same as the Bezold effect as far as I know.

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Zöllner Illusion


In this figure the black lines seem to be unparallel, but in reality they are parallel. The shorter lines are on an angle to the longer lines. This angle helps to create the impression that one end of the longer lines is nearer to us than the other end. This is very similar to the way the Wundt illusion appears. It may be that the Zöllner illusion is caused by this impression of depth.


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All of these are very interesting. If only Empiricists were still here so I could shove it in their face

The scariest optical illusion ever! Stare at the four dots for 30 seconds and close your eyes to see Jesus's face coming towards you! Or else look at the ceiling and see his face there!

This is the same image, flipped vertically    

Optical illusion of the year 2010


Link: www.newscientist.com/article/dn18886

Get read to get bowled over!

As you can see, the girl changes her direction of spinning. Just keep looking at it for a while.



And finally.... This is the most trickiest illusion ever!

 Is it a Duck or a Rabbit?

Focus on the red dot, the blue cirlce disappears after sometime!