This illusion by “Brusspup” (Facebook page here) is pretty amazing, and it’s not computer generated but it’s real. You’ll see at the end how the dino was made to create the illusion—and you can make your own using the links below. It’s easy; you just print the figures, cut them out, and fold.

The creator adds this information:

I created the song in this video. A download link for the song will be available shortly.
You can visit my profile on iTunes for other songs I’ve created.
Song name: The last sun.
Thank you to my friend Kath for creating the T-rex design!
I’ve included a link for you to print out your own. The trick looks best through a camera. If you close one eye and move back and forth it works pretty good too.

GreenT-Rex image
Red T-rex
Blue T-rex

This is based on the famous dragon illusion which was inspired by Jerry Andrus. I’ve always wanted to try this illusion with several of these at once. I wanted to use 20 or 30 but after I tried a test with only 12, I realized 20 or 30 was going to be too many. So another thing I’ve always wanted to try was to have a large version. The original file was about 9 feet X 9 feet. I had to split the image into 4 files so the printer as my local print shop could print it. I traced all of the pieces on cardboard which I used to build a support structure for the prints. I used small pieces of cardboard and hot glue to make the structure really solid. One problem that I had was that the paper for the large dragon was really shiny. So if you look closely you can see the reflection of the eyes on the “top” and side panels. I bought some matte spray to try and minimize the reflections. It worked a little. Over all I was happy with the results.

The t-rex design is an original design used with the Gathering for Garder 3D dragon template. The original 3D template design (dragon) was inspired by the work of Jerry Andrus to celebrate Gathering for Gardner 3.

h/t: Michael, Matthew

Here’s a related set of cool illusions, and one features cats—both an animated and a real one—51 seconds in:

h/t: Chris

A tw**t from Tom Chivers (via Matthew Cobb):

But it is right!  Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy proves that the colors are indeed the same, explains why they look different, and links to other amazing color illusions. If you look at the diagram carefully, you might be able to figure out why the blue and green are really the same.

Matthew Cob sent a tw**t by Perfectly Timed:

What’s going on here?  With the help of Greg, our Color Man, we can explain it thusly: The white line at the top of the bottom half implies that the light on this hinged object is coming from above, and thus the bottom half of the object is the same color as the illuminated line, and lighter as well than the top half of the object. But it isn’t: it is in fact the same color as the top of the object. We compensate for the assumption that the bottom is lighter by visually interpreting it as lighter, so the object looks as if it were in two shades.

This is one way that evolution, I suspect, has conditioned for vision, making our brains interpret the assumption of shadowing in a way that compensates for it. A famous example of this compensation, which I’ve written about before, is the “checker shadow” illusion in which a cylinder rests on a checkerboard and casts a shadow:

Squares “A” and “B” are actually the same color and shade (if you don’t believe that, go to my original post to see for yourself, as well as the explanation for this remarkable illusion).

Matthew Cobb sent me this image from Richard Wiseman’s Quirky Mind Stuff. It’s an example of “the Ponzo illusion.”

The images of all of these cars are the same size.  If you don’t believe it, measure them!

More proof that neither evolution (nor, according to Alvin Plantinga, God) gave us absolutely reliable belief-forming mechanisms.

Here’s another example of a Ponzo picture: