Adorable Animated Tessellation


Here’s a very fun animated tessellation picturing birds and cats. Animation truly brings a new dimension to these kind of pictures that use repetition of shapes with no overlaps and no gaps – it additionally helps you see both variations of the image, no matter whether you originally recognised the empty space containing cat shapes, white space containing birds, or both!

Looking forward to hear what you think of this? I never saw tessellations coming to life before. Perhaps once, when I think about it. Think something similar was featured in the “Escher’s working space” video we featured few months ago. Have to check it again just to make sure…

17 Replies to “Adorable Animated Tessellation”

  1. ‘Fun’ is a noun, not an adjective. One cannot say ‘very fun’, it is meaningless, like saying ‘very amusement’.

  2. I like this. My only quibble, and it is a small quibble, is that the segue from cat to bird is a bit too quick to really see the tessellation itself properly.

    1. Actually I do not think the bird is in the illusion when it first starts. When the cat jumps, and the legs are up, the birds become visible. At the start of the illusion, the cats are sitting and there is no bird seen. I’ve run it again and again looking for the gaps to try and see a bird. I don’t think there is a bird until after the cat jumps.

  3. This is cute, but it isn’t an animated tesselation, (although it does become a static one), and not worthy of Escher since the figures as drawn are cartoonish and very minimal in detail. Escher’s genius resided in the complexity and detail of his art. The birds are not even present until after the cats have finished their leap.

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