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  • Whatup DONG fans?

  • My name is Michael

  • And if you know me at all you know that I love tabs. I have tabs open on my phone, on my laptop, on

  • my desktop. Just hundreds of them thousands of them saved in my history

  • I like to collect websites, which are things you can do online now guys

  • I went through my collection recently and

  • Pulled out all of the ones that were optical illusions

  • These are illusions that I've discovered in the last few months

  • or was reminded of in the last few months that I wanted to remember and I figured hey

  • I'll just share them with you guys here in a DONG.

  • So let's begin. Now you cannot talk about optical illusions on the internet without talking about Michael Bach. His website is

  • phenomenal. It's interactive first of all which means that you can really play around with the parameters that make the illusion work.

  • I want to start today with the ghostly gaze.

  • Illusion all right now take a look at this person's face

  • She appears quite clearly to be looking to the left, right?

  • But now let's turn down the blur and see what she's really looking at

  • AHH!!! Us.

  • Pretty spooky right? If you blur the image. She appears to be looking to the left, but take away the blur

  • She's looking right at you. So what's going on here? Well this is called a hybrid image

  • It is constructed out of two things. One has what is called a high spatial frequency meaning

  • there's a lot of edges and details that are very fine. The other has a sort of low spatial frequency

  • It's more blobs not a lot of edges and detail.

  • The amount of information you get from both of those depends on how close you are to the image. If you're near an image

  • its high spatial frequency the lines the contrast gives you a lot of information

  • But the big blobby vague shapes kind of just don't mean anything, but if you go far away

  • You lose your ability to really discern what you're getting from the fine details and the vague ones start to paint a more clear picture

  • You've probably seen an even more famous version of this that involves Albert

  • Einstein or does it? I'm gonna take my phone out turn on the camera and record a video

  • and show you what happens to Albert's face as I move away. I'm sure you've seen this one before but don't worry.

  • That was a photo. Here comes a video. Alright, so there's Albert, but now let's walk away and the first thing

  • we'll notice is Hannah say hello. Hey, wait a second where's Albert going

  • He's becoming Marilyn Monroe. Well actually the further

  • out I go, the more like Marilyn that's gonna look.

  • Let's see what happens if I zoom in. Ooohhhh it's Alberto again!

  • uhh that's not his name, Alberto.

  • But if I come in close

  • Einstein appears again. This works in the same way that the ghostly gaze illusion works.

  • Here's a slightly different version, but it's broken down the two images

  • We have a high spatial frequency image of Albert Einstein, which means lots of fine details edges high contrast

  • And then we have a very blobby

  • Soft not a lot of sharp detail image of Marilyn Monroe

  • Up close an image like this of Marilyn Monroe is hard to decipher.

  • It's hard to really figure out

  • but the detail in Albert Einstein's face is easy to see. As we move further away the fine details get lost we lose Albert and

  • the blobby vague shapes start to mean something to us and Marilyn emerges. Pretty awesome. Now

  • I've linked papers down below that explain this in more detail. A lot of this work has been pioneered by Aude Olivia.

  • I highly suggest reading those. Obviously what I love about Michael Bach's website is the fact that the illusions are?

  • Interactive. You've probably seen this ambiguous

  • Ballerina dancer before. The ambiguity lies in which direction she's rotating. Is she turning clockwise or counterclockwise

  • Well as soon as you look you your brain makes a guess and it's often hard to switch and see it from the other

  • perspective, but have a few friends come over and you might be surprised that they believe she's moving in a different way. This often leads

  • to arguments over what the figure is really doing

  • But Michael Bach's website allows you to more easily flip between both

  • directions of rotation by putting eyeballs on the figure. For instance right now

  • I think that she appears to be moving counterclockwise if seen from above so let me hit clockwise

  • Whoa now the eyes

  • help it reverse, and now she's moving clockwise from above for me. Very very cool, but now let's talk about

  • the Thatcher

  • Illusion. Right now you probably already think that the face looks a little bit weird

  • Well if you turn it upside down you'll see that it is actually

  • Really weird. When it faces upside down all of the cognitive tools. We have for analyzing how it looks and what it's doing well

  • they're not as great at doing their job, but enough about faces. Let's talk about color the

  • Exploratorium has a fantastic website full of interactive exhibits. This one I just discovered this morning actually

  • It's a fading dot illusion. You've got a green

  • Blob with a littler blue blob in the middle. Now

  • it's very important for this illusion to work that you stare at that blue dot

  • and don't move your eyes. Really just keep your eyes as still as possible and the blue dot will disappear

  • Until you move your eyes. The very second you move your eyes

  • it'll pop back into frame. Now some people find it easier to just look at the edge of the square keeping their eyes completely still

  • Until the blue goes away, but the second you move your eyes towards anything the blue dot appears

  • That's because when your eyes move

  • they collect new information and the blue dot which was kind of forgotten as being not important comes right back in because it is

  • now falling onto new cells in your retina. This illusion came from reddit, and I love it

  • We've got dots that are popping in and out of existence. The question is

  • do you and I I'm seriously asking you this do you think that the motion illusion

  • created here is of two dots going up and down or of two dots going side to side, or is it dots moving

  • Clockwise or counterclockwise. If you try really hard you can actually

  • flip your perspective just with your own will. Oh yeah I just did it. Now I'm seeing them going back and forth now

  • What's really interesting is that if you slow down

  • the frame rate of this animation it becomes even easier to flip between the different

  • perspectives. The creator of the gif luckily provided one the moves much slower and here I

  • Find it incredibly easy to choose exactly what I want the dots to be doing for me. When it's moving faster

  • I honestly cannot picture them moving in any kind of rotationally clockwise or counter clockwise

  • way, but when they're slow jeez I can just at will at the very moment I decide I want to see it see the motion

  • that I want to see. Now let's talk about hinged

  • tessellations.

  • A tessellation is a tiling of figures that can cover a plane indefinitely

  • But a hinged tessellation is one in which the actual tiles can rotate and lock back into a new position

  • So here is what I love about this site by Al Grant.

  • Not only do you learn about tilings and tessellations, but you also learn about how they can be

  • Hinged and there's even a hinged tessellation generator. I can choose between trapezoid and cyclic. Let's just do trapezoid well

  • let's do cyclic first. A cyclic quadrilateral is one whose points all lie on a circle

  • and I can choose where I put them. With a square the result is quite trivial

  • but you can choose all kinds of nutty shapes

  • and then once you're happy with what you've got go ahead and hinge them and look you have created a hinged

  • tessellation. Great job. Brilliant org made this episode possible, and I love them.

  • They are right in line with what Vsauce stands for: learning and

  • asking questions. On the site you can run through courses that quiz you and you might not get them all right.

  • I certainly don't but by getting questions wrong

  • I think you learn more, so let's just dive into the tessellations page. You can learn about them. Now here

  • we have a question : If extended to cover the plane which of the patterns below is a

  • regular tiling?

  • Very good. Well, I think

  • That I should have read all the information that came before this question

  • But I'm gonna go with D. Oh maybe it's all of them

  • Incorrect, but look what it says underneath incorrect. It's okay. Getting stumped is part of learning, and I totally agree!

  • That's what I love about brilliant.org. Also

  • we are offering a special deal the first 36 people to sign up to brilliant.org using the link below

  • Will get 20% off their annual

  • subscription so check that out. Thank you for supporting Vsauce. Thank you for supporting DONG and as always

  • thanks for watching

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