New optical illusion: An oscillating visual paradox!

by | Sunday, May 13, 2018


A design for the word “illusions” inspired by a design by Scott Kim. 

I have been obsessed with optical illusions for for a long time. This interest has played out in many ways: from the hundreds of ambigrams I have created to the new year’s videos we create as a family. In this post I want to share, what I believe is an original optical illusion, something I have never seen before in my years of playing with such objects.

But first, some context.

Optical illusions come in a variety of types. Two types that I am love are ambiguous figures and visual paradoxes/impossible figures. 

Ambiguous figures are images that can be interpreted in more than one way. The “face-vase” illusion or the “duck-rabbit” illusion are famous examples of such illusions. These illusions usually have two alternative and competing interpretations—and the mind oscillates/flits back and forth between them unable to settle on one. Also, it is difficult, if not impossible, to see both these interpretations at the same time. We see one, or the other, never both together.


Three examples of ambiguous illusions, do you see “two faces or a vase,” “a duck or a rabbit,” and finally, do you see a bunch of cubes with the yellow shape is at the top or at the bottom? 

Visual paradoxes / Impossible figures are images that look like real objects that can never exist in the real world. M.C. Escher created some of the most iconic of such images – the unending staircase and waterfall being great examples. There are many other examples, some of which are represented below.

Three different impossible figures. The first is an impossible cube and the other two are different representations of an impossible triangle (also known as a Penrose Triangle). 

So with this we come to my key discovery/invention—an optical illusion that is both an ambiguous figure AND a visual paradox, i.e. an image flips between two interpretations that are cannot exist in the real world.

Here it is…  spend a moment on it. What do you see? Try focusing on the white “stars” at on the left and on the right? What changes? What happens if you focus on the blue shapes?

What we have is essentially a combination of 2 different impossible triangles. Can you see each of them? Can you see both at the same time? (Note: If you have difficulty seeing the triangles, focusing on the “star-shaped” pattern may help.)

The images below, and the animated gif should be self-explanatory – demonstrating the two independent interpretations of the image.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Rethinking Creativity, Race, Culture & Education

Rethinking Creativity, Race, Culture & Education

Episode 115 (dated July 30, 2022) of the Silver Lining for Learning webinar series focused on critiquing existing research on creativity - which for the most part has focused on the psychological and cognitive aspects of creativity. The guests on the show (Lori Patton...

Hotels & the internet

A while ago David Pogue, NYTimes tech columnist and reviewer, asked a his readers a series of questions that he hadn't been able to find an answer for. This list, called Pogue's Imponderables, generated a lot of comments from readers. One of his questions was "Why is...

TPACK Newsletter #25, October 2015

TPACK Newsletter, Issue #25: October 2015 (Updated) Welcome to the twenty-fifth edition of the (approximately bimonthly) TPACK Newsletter! TPACK work is continuing worldwide. This document contains recent updates to that work that we hope will be interesting and...

Chimp number sense…

A video, brought to you by Slate, titled "How smart are chimps?" I apologize in advance for the commercial at the beginning of the video.

Koehler & Mishra (in press)

Just for the record, Matt Koehler and I have a new piece in press. I should note that significant portions of this paper were condensed and updated from Mishra & Koehler (2007), with permission from AACE. Email me if you want a draft copy. The complete reference and...

TPACKed and ready to go

I am off to the Netherlands, specifically to Twente University to talk and discuss TPACK and other interesting stuff. I have been invited by Dr. Joke Voogt, Associate Professor at the Department of Curriculum Design and Educational Innovation from the Faculty of...

Update IV

Chris from Creativity Portal dropped off a "strong" message to me on my website (see it here). Just a couple of points. First, I have not received the email they sent me (I do not question the fact that they did send it) - just that I did not receive it. I checked my...

Not so Cuil

I was just trying out Cuil the new search engine and came up with some strange results. This is what the front page looks like, rather dark for my liking, but again they had to do something different from Google's stark white front page. if you click on the "About...

Reimagining conteXt in TPACK: New article

Reimagining conteXt in TPACK: New article

Back in September I wrote a long-ish blog post about something that had bothered me for years and years about the canonical TPACK diagram. It had to do with how contextual knowledge was represented in the diagram, or rather how it was not represented in the diagram....

0 Comments

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Paradoxes, illusions & visual wordplay – Punya Mishra's Web - […] a brand new optical illusion, combining an ambiguous image with an impossible figure (more details here). It was somewhat…

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *