Click on each slide to see it in higher resolution.
Mark Changizi is a professor of cognitive science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the author of The Vision Revolution (Benbella Books).
For more information about my theory, see LiveScience, New York Times, BoingBoing, SciAm. The best introduction is chapter 3 of The Vision Revolution. And the journal article is here.
This first appeared on December 24, 2009, as a feature at ScientificBlogging.com.
[...] same, but appear quite different depending on where they lie within the radial display. Here is a link where I have written up a very short explanation of illusions like [...]
[...] for anticipating the near future so as to thereby perceive the present. Here’s a short, four-slide introduction to the [...]
I don’t find your explanation convincing. You say that our system of visual interpretation evolved over millions of years and yet you use straight roads and fast movement to illustrate the vanishing point. Ancient man lived in a world with no straight lines, no roads, no buildings. He also moved no faster than 3mph for 99% of the time. the other 1% maybe getting up to 8 mph. Could you please correlate these facts with your assumptions?
The illusion magnitudes are consistent with human speeds, as I have shown in my published papers. And even normal human forward movement leads to optic blur on one’s retina. Furthermore, the straight-line stimulus I use is crucial for explaining / illustrating how objects in one’s visual field distort in a non-Euclidean manner as the observer moves forward.
[...] for neural delays, something I discuss at length in my book, The Vision Revolution (and here is a four-slide primer). [...]
[...] Graduate student Jordan Suchow won the Best Illusion of 2011. Intriguing, and also see his variants on the illusion. I had about ten minutes to generate an ecological hypothesis for why we see it, and the article hints obliquely at this. Also, see LiveScience’s recent illusion gallery. (Related, see why we see illusions, in four slides.) [...]