Accidental camouflages are so mind-bending, you may need to look twice or thrice to find out exactly what’s going on. Call it “Where’s Waldo” real-life edition, or the types of optical illusions that happen when an object blends into its surroundings. So to find out what’s exactly up with these illusions, Bored Panda previously spoke with Lisa Yaszek, a Regents Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech where she researches and teaches science fiction as a global language crossing centuries, continents, and cultures.
“As humans, we’re fascinated by optical illusions both because they are a symbol of human creativity and because they demonstrate just how good we are at flexible thinking,” Lisa Yaszek told us. She added that there is something inherently pleasing about the ability to perceive an image in different ways, argued Lisa, and she wondered if it’s perhaps it’s part of our natural aptitude for learning.
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“Whatever the source of our love for optical illusions, it’s fascinating to note that the desire to create optical illusions seems to be as old as humanity itself. The prehistoric artists who decorated the Cave of Altima 20,000 years ago used the natural bulges in the rock walls of the cave to give volume and depth to the animals they drew there; the Greek-Egyptian inventor Heron of Alexandria (10CE-70AD) engineered a device that made it look like priests could open temple doors with verbal commands; and the Airavatesvara Temple in India is covered in 800+-year-old carvings of animals that change species when viewed from different angles.”
Therefore, it’s no surprise that optical illusions never fail to capture our imagination. “Whenever people invent new creative or technical processes, they use them to create optical illusions! Indeed, we’ve seen this throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: pioneering filmmakers like George Melies drew on vaudeville stagecraft and scratched and painted on celluloid to create the first filmic special effects; Op artists Josef Albers and Bridgette Riley manipulated geometric forms on canvas to convince the eye that unreal spatial places existed; and today we have digital technologies that allow us to radically transform the scale and presentation of images in sometimes truly mind-blowing ways,” Lisa explained.
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