As promised in my previous 2009 Recap in Numbers post, I have gathered some of my best posts and illusions from the past year, and decided to share them with all of you that keep this site prosperous. This is my personal “Top 10 Optical Illusions” list for 2009, and I hope this practice becomes standard in years to come. As I mentioned, I’m perfectly aware we already have the ratings and Top 10 list placed in the sidebar, but here you will find included all those illusions that amazed me the most throughout the past year. Either with their illusion effect, beauty or simply because they were something new in this optical illusion field. I have selected more than 30 illusions that I find somehow special, and it was a real task to reduce them to mere 10. Still, below each one I added a short explanation and linked those that didn’t make it to the final cut. No more talk, let us begin with the list:
When posted, this illusion didn’t attract as much attention as I hoped it would. Perhaps I didn’t explain it well enough, or simply I was isolated in linking with this one. I just can’t stop admiring to some of Guido’s ambiguous creations. Another 2009 favorite of this type was Encore by Shigeo Fukuda.
“Why the heck has Vurdlak decided to include these boring old spirals in his collection, when we already saw bunch of them over the time?” Well, out of the all motion-moving and seemingly animated illusions, I have to say I never saw any capable of fooling me this hard! With all my optical illusion experience behind me, I still struggled into believing this one is static!
After posting the original See Saw, Mr. Anonymous created an animated GIF that strengthened the effect even further! Look how our see-saw switches between unbalanced and balanced, when all we do, is remove the filling pattern on second identical frame.
I believe there is no need explaining why I included this photo of Mother Earth. Have you ever seen a non-photoshopped photo of a nature, that resembled a face in so much details?
By now, most of you got to know me, and my unexplainable resistance to posting video illusion. Still, this has to be the coolest optical illusion video after the Little Green Dragon! Another one posted in 2009 worth mentioning, would be: Pocket Rocket.
What would you expect from a guy in middle of his twenties? I love all that is sexy, and it wasn’t easy not to spam this list with more than 10 illusions from my Sexy Category. My self-control prevailed, so I included only one. I’m still not sure whether Sexy Lamp should have won this spot…
Yup, I appreciate visually appealing illusions the most. Like them even better if they’re effective and make you say Wow! Xaver Nitsch managed to create such one. It kept my attention, and stayed in my memory. The twist was a little different than what we were previously used to see when looking at Relative Cars.
What can I say? I must be a an addict when it comes to languages and cryptography. In my first compilation for this list, there were more than 4 similar ones involving exotic writings. Finally, I decided against Secret Arabic Message, Square Calligraphy Classroom and Learn Chinese the Easy Way. Cyrillic felt somehow closest to my geo-location.
Why did I chose this one? Well, because it was one of those rare ones that kept me thinking and gave me hard time understanding it. Usually relative-size illusions are obvious, but this one forces you to think!
Even though I can’t say for sure that all of the above illusions are truly ranked in correct order, what I am certain of, is that Craig Tabary’s body painted Leopard marked 2009 for me. Perhaps it wasn’t the most realistic body paint drawing we had opportunity to see, but it was the hardest one to distinguish from a flat drawing. This is my favorite optical illusion in 2009. Another body paint illusion worth mentioning would be: Amazing Obama.
