A perceptual illusion I hadn't seen before

[mmcirvin]

Mr. Angry and Mrs. Calm. Which is which? How far away are you standing?

And how'd they do it? Mr. Rowland doesn't understand how it works, but I think I do: from close-up, your eye and brain's feature detectors are mostly registering high-frequency information in the picture; from far away you can't see that at all so you use the low frequencies instead. So you can make an ambiguous image like this just by superimposing images made with different Photoshop filters.

The page it came from has another one with Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, in which they pull a trick with the background to make it work better (to compensate for Thatcher's bigger hair).

Comments

[iayork.livejournal.com]

I've never seen one. I give up easily, though, because I can't imagine what possble benefit it is to me to stare at these things for a half-hour, in order to see a vague and fuzzy picture of something I'm not interested in. If the whole point is that illusions R kewl, well, that's a concept I've been fine with since I was four, and I don't need to reinforce it any more.