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3quarksdaily Page 1 of 4 | ABOUT US | ARCHIVES | LINKS | RSS | MONDAY COLUMNS | Search | « Fears for Democracy in India | Main | Hitchens on the Life and Death of Jerry Falwell » HELP 3 QUARKS DAILY MAY 17, 2007 BEST VISUAL ILLUSION OF THE YEAR CONTEST WINNERS BOOKMARK THIS PAGE From the contest website: 2007 First prize 3QD ADVERTISING The Leaning Tower Illusion Frederick Kingdom, Ali Yoonessi and Elena Gheorghiu Visit our sponsors: Radical Society Radical Society is a quarterly journal of politics and culture. As a forum for serious and sustained intellectual critique of the national conversation, the magazine publishes commentary, reviews, essays, Here is a novel illusion that is as striking as it is simple. The two images of the Leaning Tower dispatches, scholarship, art, of Pisa are identical, yet one has the impression that the tower on the right leans more, as if fiction and poetry. photographed from a different angle. The reason for this is because the visual system treats the two images as if part of a single scene. Normally, if two adjacent towers rise at the same angle, Read more... their image outlines converge as they recede from view due to perspective, and this is taken into Advertise on 3 Quarks Daily account by the visual system. So when confronted with two towers whose corresponding outlines are parallel, the visual system assumes they must be diverging as they rise from view, and this is what we see. The illusion is not restricted to towers photographed from below, but works well with other scenes, such as railway tracks receding into the distance. What this illusion reveals is less to do with perspective, but how the visual system tends to treat two side- http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/05/best_visual_ill.html 5/17/2007 3quarksdaily Page 2 of 4 by-side images as if part of the same scene. However hard we try to think of the two photographs of the Leaning Tower as separate, albeit identical images of the same object, our Total Audio-Visual visual system regards them as the ‘Twin Towers of Pisa’, whose perspective can only be Rental interpreted in terms of one tower leaning more than the other. Call Now--800-424-2858-- Offices in Nashville, Knoxville, Chattanooga More illusions here. www.gaultav.com Posted by Abbas Raza at 01:58 PM | Permalink Visual Manufacturing Web Web Integration with VM, Web Portal Internet integration for Visual www.VisualWebTool.com COMMENTS POST A COMMENT Visual Studio Integration Use XMLSpy with VS.NET Name: Remember personal info? 2005 Easy-to-Use. Free Download! www.Altova.com/XMLSpy Email Address: Hallucinations Info What is Hallucinations URL: Visual? 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