My senior undergraduate research thesis was based on the illusions Dr. Kitaoka had constructed. I tested people's ability to perform tasks that required them to understand heightmap data given one of three randomly selected renderers: a top-down, completely flat map with no height rendering as a control; a similar rendering but with Akiyoshi's "A Bulge" illusion generated on the fly for each "hill"; and an isometric rendering where the hills were rendered in 2.5D. I was able to show that the illusion method was about 95% as effective at conveying heightmap data as the isometric map, while being no more computationally complex than the flat map. At the time (2005), it was one of the first direct uses of optical illusion in computer graphics. It was also one of the first papers to discuss the importance of changing graphics techniques to extend battery life on mobile devices.

EDIT: forgot I had put up all my stuff into a Github repo a few years ago: https://github.com/capnmidnight/optical-illusions-in-cg/blob...

For context, he got a little boost recently from his "strawberry cake" illusion tweet : https://twitter.com/AkiyoshiKitaoka/status/83674359846907084...

Something so refreshing about this unapologetically 1996 styled web site and vast amount of incredible content. This is a great find.

Having seen the rotating snakes illusion before, I decided to stare at it, playing with the focus of my eyes until the illusion of motion stopped.

Once it did, I found that many of the other illusions also didn't work. Also, I have a headache, and everything not on my screen seems slightly unfocused.

Clearly I tried a bit too hard!

This is a little off topic but seems as good a place as any to ask:

Is anyone working on computer vision that is "tricked" by illusions? I'm curious because it seems like a good way to test how accurately computer vision maps to human vision (then again, I'm not even sure that's a goal!)

Many of these are fantastic, I could swear some of them used actual animation. For example http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/kagero3e.html

What causes the appearance of movement?

I can't get the rotating rays one to work. Just stays stationary. All others are fine.

Aghh, this is what it feels like to have a migraine with aura, except that with a migraine your vision looks like this no matter what you're looking at.

Nice paper from 2008 here exploring how to make specific patterns : http://graphics.csie.ncku.edu.tw/SAI/

After looking this page everything seems to be moving.

Am I the only person who is made nauseous by the rotating snakes illusion? I had to hit the back button before the page was done loading.

"A bulge" is brilliant! Pinch-zooming on a phone and lining up the square lines against the screen edge is mind blowing.

Some of them don't move at all for me... except while scrolling the page.