标签: impossible balls

My old chum Norm emailed me recently to say "Hi Max, I know you like neat visual illusions, and this is a pretty cool one..." He then pointed me at a page on the MIT website showing a really incredible shade illusion. I've seen this sort of thing before, but it never fails to amaze me. The idea is that you have a checkerboard of light and dark gray squares with some object casting a shadow across them. Two of the squares are brought to our attention – one is a light gray square that falls inside the shadowed area, while the other is a dark gray square that falls outside the shadow. The amazing thing is that both squares are actually the same shade of gray ( Click here to see the image plus a full description on the MIT website). Now, it's one thing seeing this as a static image, but the really cool thing is that there's a video on YouTube of a live person demonstrating the same thing with a human-size 3D model. This really is quite spectacular to watch. The problem, as ever, is that you can't just watch one video on YouTube, which is how I came to find myself viewing an Impossible Balls Illusion . While you are watching this video, pause it at the 20 second mark and see if you can guess how it's done, then resume the video to see the solution. But wait, there's more, because from here I bounced over to a video called Vanishing Coin Trick (How To). Once you see how this is done you say to yourself "That's so simple." I don't know about you, but I also said to myself "I bet that would fool my 16-year old son and his friends!" Which is why as soon as I post this blog I'm going to race down to my local Hobby Lobby store to purchase some heavy black felt, because I intend to play this trick this evening (grin).

I got an email from my old chum Norm saying "Hi Max, I know you like neat visual illusions, and this is a pretty cool one..." He then pointed me at a page on the MIT website showing a really incredible shade illusion. I've seen this sort of thing before, but it never fails to amaze me. The idea is that you have a checkerboard of light and dark gray squares with some object casting a shadow across them. Two of the squares are brought to our attention – one is a light gray square that falls inside the shadowed area, while the other is a dark gray square that falls outside the shadow. The amazing thing is that both squares are actually the same shade of gray ( Click here to see the image plus a full description on the MIT website). Now, it's one thing seeing this as a static image, but the really cool thing is that there's a video on YouTube of a live person demonstrating the same thing with a human-size 3D model. This really is quite spectacular to watch. The problem, as ever, is that you can't just watch one video on YouTube, which is how I came to find myself viewing an Impossible Balls Illusion . While you are watching this video, pause it at the 20 second mark and see if you can guess how it's done, then resume the video to see the solution. But wait, there's more, because from here I bounced over to a video called Vanishing Coin Trick (How To). Once you see how this is done you say to yourself "That's so simple." I don't know about you, but I also said to myself "I bet that would fool my 16-year old son and his friends!" Which is why as soon as I post this blog I'm going to race down to my local Hobby Lobby store to purchase some heavy black felt, because I intend to play this trick this evening (grin).