There are some pretty cool backpacks on the market with LED screens, but this one from Yihong Technology works its visual magic differently. It uses a spinning fan blade with 510 flickering LEDs that display moving images using a persistence of vision illusion. It’s just for advertising and not carrying things, though.
Filmmaker Quek Shio recently put together a slick new office space for working on his videos. Instead of simply sharing a few still images of the setup, he used his editing skills to create a short film filled with invisible cuts and visual trickery that make it look like magic.
While it’s possible to build a hubless bicycle, it’s a mechanically complex feat. Builder The Q came up with a similar look that does away with the spokes instead, replacing them with thick polyacrylate sheets. We’re not sure how durable they are or how they affect ride quality, but it’s a really cool illusion.
Mad scientist Mike Ando aka RIUM+ created a unique display inspired by the holographic imagers in the adventure game Riven: The Sequel to Myst. His patent-pending Andotrope has a cylindrical display that spins with the turn of a crank, and displays an image that appears to follow you no matter what angle you view it from. Works great for Princess Leia, too.
Starting and keeping a fire going takes time and effort, not to mention wood. The Flameship creates a convincing illusion of fire without the dangers of a real fire. It uses computer-controlled LEDs illuminating steam vapor to produce its cool-touch flame effect. It offers five flame effect settings, and its body looks like a sculptural work of modern art.
From a flaming bubble vortex to manipulating water with sound waves to balancing coins on a strand of thread, Mr. Hacker is here to show us more than 30 simple yet effective tricks and illusions enabled by the power of physics. Kids, don’t try that balloon-swallowing trick at home.
Despite what your eyes are telling you, the blue and red LEGO space explorer minifigs in this image are the exact same size. Mathematician Henry Segerman shows how perspective and a custom 3D-printed structure produce this mind-bending optical illusion.
When you look at an old-timey barber pole, its stripes appear to spiral upward. Science educator Steve Mould shares a similar illusion designed by Ada Cohen that uses intertwined helixes to create the illusion that they’re disappearing endlessly into the top of the rig. Bottom line, spirals and helices have a way of messing with our brains.
It’s been some time since Captain Disillusion debunked a video, but this one was worth the wait. This time, he took on an illusion in which a magician appears to push a card through a glass window to an orangutan. After putting a few theories to the test, it doesn’t add up – but Cap’s sleuthing eventually reveals the truth.
Need to unwind your mind? The Wryfield Lab YouTube channel is filled with soothing visuals and soundscapes. Among their collection is this reverse video of tomatoes being sliced, resulting in the illusion that they’re being reassembled. They also unsliced some kiwi and paprika, as well as unpeeled a grapefruit.
Most of us celebrated Christmas with a real tree or a store-bought fake one. Sean Hodgins made his tree out of light. He created the electronic tree using a triangular bar rigged with LEDs that spins at high speed to create the illusion. It looks amazing, but it’s dangerous enough that he stands behind a blast shield to use it.
During an episode of Penn and Teller: Fool Us, magician Axel Adler turned up with a mind-boggling illusion we’ve never seen before. The trick: make it look like he has three legs – and you can never quite tell which ones are real and which is a fake. It’s kind of like that old cups and balls trick but you try and follow the fake leg.
Wood Season shows us how they created a chess board that looks like its playing surface is floating on water. The trick was encasing oak wood blocks in a thick bath of clear resin, then backlighting them with LEDs. A pearlescent resin backing and floating pine cones add to the effect. The set is available for sale on Etsy.
Drew Builds Stuff has an office in the basement of his parents’ house. Because of its subterranean location, it doesn’t get much light. To brighten things up, he built a window wall out of three 75″ 4K TVs, resulting in a 12-foot diagonal image. Since he can load up any video footage, he can pretend to be anywhere on Earth.
Thus far, humans haven’t figured out how to control gravity. But it’s easy to achieve the illusion that we can manipulate its forces through the magic of photography. COOPH shares a handful of simple tricks which use rotation and props to help sell the illusion.
Placing a one-way mirror in front of a regular mirror can create an infinite reflection illusion. It’s typically used to make glitzy disco-style lighting, but in this video from Wiz’s Woodwork, he shows us how to use the effect to make it look like his coffee table leads down a very long mine shaft.
Inspired by the work of VILE/a>, Slovakian street artist DOKE took on a fun and difficult spray paint challenge. The goal? Create a photorealistic scene that makes it look like holes are cut through a wall so you can see the building, grass, and trees behind it. Of course, the illusion requires the light and viewing angle to be just right.
Artists often like to paint what they’re looking at, but this one takes things to another level. Döuyin contributor tcmss1.0 looked out beyond their tiny, tilted canvas and painted precisely what they saw – preserving the perspective and making the painting gradually disappear into the background.
Our brains can be easily tricked by optical illusions. StruckDuck shows off five different 3D-printed objects which seem to defy logic but are just messing with our minds thanks to the camera’s perspective. You can download STL files for all of these objects on StruckDuck’s Etsy shop.
Artist Leandro Erlich is known for large-scale installations incorporating optical illusions. This simple yet effective illusion combines an image of a building with mirrors at a 45º angle, turning visitors on the floor into wall-climbing Spider-People. It’s on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through 9.15.22.
We’re fascinated by the variety of machines you find in factories. This particular device is fairly simple – a couple of rollers and a spinning blade. But it’s the stroboscopic optical illusion that occurs when it spins up to speed that makes it so satisfying to watch. Somebody needs to turn this into an endless loop.
At first glance, it looks like the ball in this video from StruckDuck is defying gravity and rolling up a slide. The trick involves a specially-distorted 3D print and a camera placed in exactly the right spot to pull off the illusion. You can buy the STL template file for the slide on Etsy.
If there is a higher power controlling things on Earth, we like to imagine they reach down with their giant hands to move things around while we’re not looking. Filmmaker Erik Schmitt’s forced perspective illusion of a hand moving cars on a ferry is pretty much what we’ve envisioned. His TikTok channel has lots more visual tomfoolery.