my fiance` showed me this website this morning and i was totally blown away by this guy's talent. if i have half his talent i'd die a happy woman. anyhoo, thought you guys might enjoy this - 

http://www.rense.com/general67/street.htm

We have street artists sometimes around where I live, seen nothing this good though!

Attached Link: http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/

BTW - If you like (somewhat more standard) optical illusions, have a gander at the above link. I particularly like the "rotating snake" illusion (In the panel on right, click on 2nd down in LH column..)

Cheers,
Diolma

I'd seen some of those before, but they're still amazing, and certainly worth a re-visit! Thanks for that link :oD

oh and diolma, if you like the Rotating Snake pic, do the REAL creator a favour and visit his site, there's MANY more optical illusions there - with an explanation of WHY they appear to move, too

http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html

ernyoka - MANY THX for that link!! I'd lost it! (It was the one I was looking for before I posted the one I did..)

(Now re-bookmarked)

Cheers,
Diolma

PS. Am now off to another form of Optical (and sometimes reality) illusion, BBC.CO.UK (for the news)..

thanks for the links you guys...yes i have seen those before. i am an avid fan of the website "what the bleep do we know" and i remembered they featured those rotating snakes in one of their newsletters. it's awesome just what the eye sees isn't it? makes you wonder whether what goes on in the brain seeing images like that =)

"it's awesome just what the eye sees isn't it? makes you wonder whether what goes on in the brain seeing images like that =)"

Actually (AFIK), it not what the eye sees, it's what the brain makes of it. And that includes the "Pavement Artist's" effects...

The Eye just sees (OK, a little simplistic, but ...)
The Brain tries to make sense of what the eye sees. It tries to put what is seen into a context that it knows. Most of what it knows is drawn from every-day world experience ('cos humankind would have died out milennia ago if it couldn't do that. - mostly by stumbling over the edges of cliffs with one single step ...ooooooppppss.......). Which is why clever tricks can trick the brain. The brain interprets what is seen into the context/"world view" it has set up.

Which is also (co-incidentally) why the whole 2D artistic genre exists. After all - all you're looking at is a flat (2D) image - which the brain translates into the "most likely" 3D representation of that 2D image...

Sorry - getting too philosophical here. I'll shut up...

Cheers,
Diolma

lol, not at all hon....actually, i am a huge fan of quantum physics and it's relation to our everyday lives (no, it's not just  about numbers and equations and complicated theories, hehehe) and one of the things that we'd sometimes talk about is how a brain interprets what one sees. they did a test on a subject and showed this person an object and watched his brain activity as they were viewing this object and certain parts of their brain light up. next they did was remove that object and had the person imagine the object and they discovered that the same parts of the brain lit up which led them to the question - does the brain see, or do the eyes see? hence the question..."what happened to the cat?" but that's another experiment there altogether. very interesting really and we can branch this subject out to so many different possibilities and theories but we'd also risk our audience to boredom, lol.