Optical Illusions: The Science of Visual Perception

This fascinating collection of more than 300 visual puzzles and enigmatic designs will have you wondering exactly what you are seeing, from baffling shapes that change before your eyes to hidden figures and dazzling graphic patterns. Featured in four galleries, the book includes the well-known — Shepard's Tabletop, Wade's Spiral and Escher's Impossible Box — and the more obscure. Also included are notes about the stories behind the illusions and their inventors.

With a huge variety of themes and effects, every type of optical illusion is here: much-loved ground/field reversal images where one shape switches into another and back again, Escher's impossible crates, eternal spirals and much more. With illusions rendered in photography, artwork and computer imaging, The Great Book of Optical Illusions proves that these magical eye tricks never grow old. From a 12th-century Japanese Noh mask and optical tricks based on mathematical formulas, to illusions you can recreate yourself, all the world's most fascinating and startling optical illusions are here in one full color book.

About the author:

Al Seckel is one of the world's leading authorities on illusions. He has lectured extensively on the subject both in the United States and abroad, at venues which include many of the world's most prestigious universities. He is currently working on a comprehensive treatise on illusions for MIT, and designs interactive illusion and perception galleries for science museums all over the globe. He works in the Division of Computational and Neuronal Systems at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.