Site status: If you visited this website in previous two days, you probably noticed we had some serious issues with this site, resulting in most of our icons, images and illusions not showing. This is because most of our images are hosted on Photobucket Pro account, which was down much longer than we expected (due to their system maintenance). Even though we manged to bring everything back up, this made me insecure in future relationship with them. I felt helpless, knowing there isn’t much I can do except wait for the service to come back up. As a result, I’m now positive something has to be done ASAP. As of this Monday, I’m pushing all my energy into migrating this website to more secure, dedicated server with included image hosting, and tracking down best freelance coders and wordpress moguls to help us in the migration process. Now for the illusion…
I know we had bunch of Relative Sizes illusions like this one. Specially Jastrow Illusion and Tabletops. But in my opinion non of them showed the effect strongly as today’s submission did. The image below was created by Lydia Maniatis of American University. Like you presumed, all of the three pink and blue-colored parallelograms are exactly the same. All of the blue lines are equal in length, as well as all of the pink ones are the same. Box B is simply Box C rotated counterclockwise. Why is that all of the three parallelograms look different? Our visual system assumes that the diagonals in A and C are foreshortened and “stretches” them perceptually. The pink lines in B should be foreshortened and stretched, just as they are in C. But our visual system doesn’t stretch a horizontal quite as much as it stretches a diagonal. Why not?
