So technically this papercraft version of M.C. Escher’s Relativity drawing is not actually origami, but kirigami, whereby paper is made into art through the use of cutting and folding rather than exclusively folding. But let’s be honest, while practically everyone has heard of origami, most people think of it as any type of art involving paper. And it seems no one has really heard of kirigami. So, I stand by my headline here.

Anyway, we’ve seen this same Escher work in LEGO before, but there’s just something about the delicate nature of paper that makes the interpretation of the same original Escher work appear so much more fragile and delicate than the toy brick version. In a way, it’s kind of like hearing a song covered by two different bands who specialize in two different genres. You can recognize that they started out with the same influence, but the end result is drastically different.

I don’t know about you guys, but I love top ten lists. When Vurdlak asked me if i could do one, I was really excited and a little surprised to see that there are only two top-tens on the site already. Well, rest assured that if you like posts like this, I’ll be happy to contribute plenty of them to the site -in fact, if you have any ideas for lists you’d like to see, feel free to leave your ideas in the comments here and if Vurdlak and I both like them, you just might see them in an upcoming post!

As for this first top ten list, I thought tattoos would make a great topic -after all, you have to really love an illusion to get one tattooed on you. This first tattoo is my personal favorite because it’s such a classic illusion subject -multiple meaning one. These work really well as arm  tattoos because you never know if someone will view it while your arm is raised or not, making it the ideal location for such a piece. This specific design was done by David Page. On the left, you have a queen, but when you flip her upside down, you have a king.

Next, the skull illusion tattoo involves one of my favorite types of illusions. What’s so great about skull illusions?  Let’s face it, they’re just so cool! It’s also a great idea for a tattoo since skulls are one of the most classic tattoo designs, but this interpretation brings the concept from cliche to chic.

Here’s another excellent skull illusion tattoo, this one involving two clowns holding hands while drinking. The tattoo, by Kate Hoogland, just might contain the most romantic skull illusion I have ever seen.

On the right, we have a brilliant rendition of M.C. Escher’s Drawing Hands illusion. The piece, done by Cheryl Volling, has some absolutely stunning shading, giving it the life-like appearance of the original Escher drawing.

This ambigram tattoo is great in that it incorporates some of the most important aspects of philosophy into an ambigram. It’s also particularly nice in that it is easy to read and doesn’t look strange from either direction, which is one of the hardest aspects in making an ambigram.

This saint/sinner ambigram is also easy to read, but rather than focusing on the arts and sciences, it focuses on religion. I think it really seems to denote the true duality of man.

Here’s another cool religious optical illusion, albeit in a a totally different style. If you don’t see the illusion, just back up a few more inches and then you’ll see that the image comes together to make the face and beard of Jesus.

On the right is another Escher tattoo, this one is on Flickr user’s alan.maia profile and features fish transforming into birds (and vice-versa) artwork. Maybe it’s just me, but I really love how worried that last fish in the tattoo looks.

We’ve featured a few of Del-Prete’s illusions before, but this impossible object tattooed on Flickr user bonstance and seen in the book Masters of Deception is still new.

Here’s a great tattoo with a double meaning. Is it a face or a cartoonish man playing saxophone?

Bonus: While it’s little anamorphic, this one might not technically be an illusion. Even so, the details are amazing enough to make it looks completely realistic.

Now, before I sign off, I thought I’d ask you guys about your own tattoos. After all, if you’re a regular reader of Moillusions.com, you just might be the type of person who’s willing to get an illusion tattoo. So, do any of you have illusion tattoos? And if you do, do you have any links to the pictures online? I know I’m not the only one who’d love to see them.

Also, I’m a big fan of giving credit where it’s due, so if you know who did any of the tattoos that aren’t labeled, please leave their names in the comments. Thanks guys!

Designer Marc Böttler used stacked wooden blocks and combined them with tricky camera angles to turn children’s playthings into a cool set of optical illusions. He calls it his Klotz Type Experiment. Because they only form letters when viewed from certain direction, it might be one of the first official anamorphic alphabets that could be used on a computer. I think it would be really cool if he were able to turn these into an official optical illusion font, even if the full 3D anamorphic effect can be seen in person only.

I’ve never been very good at wooden block architecture, so I never really made anything all that impressive with the toys when I was younger. They do seem like a good, albeit underutilized, medium for art projects. Have any of you ever made cool stuff with wooden blocks?

I see some of you had trouble seeing the illusory colors in our latest optical illusion animation. At first I was puzzled why some of you have trouble seeing the illusion, while it worked flawlessly for the others. Then I noticed (by accident) how some browsers and computers (or mobile configurations) play the attached gif animations slower than others. I believe this is the reason why it didn’t work for everyone! The spinner needs to spin very fast in order for you to see the illusory colors. Luckily user called Jo attached the YouTube video inside one of his comment, where you can see how the illusion should behave under the normal circumstances.

Anyhow, I prepared two entertaining optical illusion constructions for you today. It’s nothing we haven’t seen already, but I believe how the beauty of both paintings makes them worthy showcasing here. Can you see the illusion yourselves? Can you see where one column starts and the other ends? I always liked this sort of illusions, no matter if it involved elephant legs, soldiers or pencils… Hope you will enjoy these as much as I have!

Seems when M. C. Escher created his famous lithograph Ascending and Descending (all the way back in 1960.), he didn’t have a slightest clew how many people will get inspired by this exceptional deceiving work! Just look how cute R. Watson’s escher-inspired Lego Penrose turned out to be!

But what I also think, is that it couldn’t hurt encouraging your little toddlers to try and construct something similar on their own! Not only will you motivate them to “mathematically” analyze the 3D space, they will also learn the beauty behind optical illusions, and educate themselves while doing it! When Escher chose to construct this deception, he placed the staircase on the roof of a building and structured the building to convey an impression of conformity to strong (but inconsistent) vanishing points. He has the right vanishing point higher than the left one.

Before I begin with today’s optical illusion, let me ask you something that has been over my head for the last couple of days. Those of you familiar with our Chrome plugin (one that features daily optical illusions in your Chrome browser), might actually provide me with needed information. It seems as of recently (for the last couple of days, to be precise) people started downloading the plugin like crazy. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with it – it’s just that I noticed huge spike in installs, which I can’t explain. I suspect the plugin was featured or recommended somewhere, yet I can’t seem to learn where. So my question is this: if you found this site in the last couple of days through our chrome plugin, can you share where did you learn of it before you installed it? How did you stumble upon our “Optical Illusion of The Day” Chrome plugin? Did you saw it featured somewhere like Chrome Store homepage or something? This info would really help!

Onto the illusion now! The strange Atomium-like impossible object below was created by Pawel Hynek in 2006. I bet you would have hard time constructing something similar on your own! After a while you get used to the idea this thing can’t exist on it’s own, and how it was probably brought to life in digital environment. Never the less, I admire the hyper-realistic result Pawel achieved. Does it remind you of a famous Brussels Atomium monument (this one)? BTW: The Atomium monument was originally built for Expo ’58 (1958 Brussels World’s Fair). Designed by André Waterkeyn, the monument consists of nine steel spheres connected so that the whole forms the shape of a unit cell of an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times!! The sculpture stands 102 meters (335 ft) tall.

Not much can be said about the impossible pipe below. I don’t know who found it, revealed it’s existence nor took the showcased photo of it. Yet what I CAN tell you is that the illusion works great! The trick is obvious, and the perspective optical illusion works flawlessly. Still, if some of you know the original source and author, be sure to ping me so I can update the post with appropriate credits. Enjoy!

If you’re familiar with the computer game called Portal, then you know just how complex the imaginary world filled with teleportation portals can be. That’s why it’s such a perfect match for the world M.C. Escher imagined, particularly his famous  Relativity piece. While we have featured a lot of artist interpretations on this classic artwork, given Portal mash up by DeviantArt user linkitch just might be one of the most fitting to the original theme. The world it depicts is too complex to ever really understand or properly navigate. Indeed, if Escher were still alive, he would almost certainly take an interest in playing Portal. This creation took nine hours to make, as the artist had to collect reference material from Relativity and Portal and then recreate them in his own 3D space. He even uploaded an image detailing the creation of the final artwork, which you might find after the jump…

As Freshome first reported, there is a new optical illusion toy in town, more specifically an impossible triangle vase. If you were looking for the perfect vase to match your favorite plant, 90° just may be the winner! Originally designed by Cuatro Cuatros, the product is based on a heavily familiar drawing of an impossible triangle, converted into a geometrical shape with volume. We’ve featured over a dozen such triangles in our impossible objects section, yet and the only problem with this vase -is that it only works when seen from one certain angle.

Depending on the point of view, both ends coincide and make it look like a closed figure. The interposition, orientation and perspective create a contradiction of the space that makes us perceive something that is not. This way, the vase becomes more than just a functional object, turning into a decorative piece that plays with perception. You can place it anywhere inside your home, as its clean, simple shape can pleasantly interfere with both a modern and traditional decor. Just put some water inside the crazy triangle vase and watch how the flower blooms in the company of an awesome optical illusion!

After Sandro Del Prete started the trend with his Folded Chessboard, many artists (inspired by his work) made an effort to recreate similar works based on Sandro’s idea. David Macdonald’s modern attempt even managed to surpass the original in internet popularity, and Megafon’s promotional poster went even further! But if you ask me, I’m almost certain none of this would ever exist if M.C. Escher decided to keep his portfolio away from public. And as it goes with famous works of art, they are recreated in LEGO more often than not. It was only a matter of time before artists like Brixie63 of Flickr recreated the “Terrace” using nothing but LEGO. Hope you like this one, and if you do – be sure to understand what Brixe did to achieve the illusion of impossible world below!

I’m certain that most of you illusion purists are already very familiar with the Penrose triangle illusion as it has already been featured extensively on the site. That being said, this great impossible font titled “Frustro” by its creator Martzi Hegedűs brings an entirely new angle (pardon the phun) to this classic illusion.

While Hegedűs has not yet added a download option so you can actually use the font yourself, he does show how it was created and the page also shows every letter and symbol in the font so someone else could, hypothetically, turn it into a useable font.

He even added an example of the font in action in what I think would be a great poster for Moillusions, complete with the impossible triangle that inspired the project.

What do you guys think, if you could download this font, would you actually use it? Personally, I think it’s just impossible enough that even Escher would love to type with it, were he still around.

As a Moillusions reader, you’ve undoubtedly already seen your share of Penrose Triangles both here and elsewhere. Even so, the concept remains fascinating, particularly when turned into real-life objects, because the design itself is, in actuality, impossible.

That’s why this Steelwork Illusion created by Deskarati is simply so fascinating -the illusion is so subtle and the photo looks so real that your mind wants to accept that it is an unaltered photograph. That is, until your brain starts to follow the lines of the steel framework and you begin realizing more and more just how impossible this building design really is.

As a huge Apple fanboy I’m more than excited about tomorrow’s iPhone 5 event. I just hope it won’t end up being the same thing, only taller. What do you think? In the mean time while we await, here are some impossible structures created and photographed by #Eric_Minnema. Up till now I didn’t have a clue Erik was responsible for one of my all-time favourite impossible objects, one we featured more than 3 years ago! Which of the structures included inside this post you like the most?

One might easily mistake below objects for half-finished sketches of candle holders, vases, bowls and bottles. However, all of these are real solid pieces of art made entirely from oxidised copper. While intended purely for decoration, they won British designer Maya Selway second prize in the Interior Design Awards at the Interior design biennale in Kortrijk, Belgium. Even though bottles and bowls are purely decorative, candle holder and the vase can be used as shown. For those of you who haven’t noticed, vase includes a tiny shallow silver dish used to hold water. How awesome is that!?

If you’re an old time fan of Mighty Optical Illusions blog you’re already familiar with all kinds of #impossible objects. We’ve featured hundreds of them over the course of seven years, however, after seeing creations of mathematician and professor Kokichi Sugihara, I will think before I use the word impossible going forward.

Sugihara’s award-winning creations often combine 2D-looking 3D structures with dynamic elements (rolling balls in this case) to toy with our perception of scale, dimension, and linear perspective. One I’m about to show you was presented few days ago at the European Conference on Visual Perception in Sardinia, Italy. For those of you who find this video familiar, you’re right – We already featured Sugihara’s creations in one of our earlier articles.

Sometimes the program turned these objects into real objects, and that’s how I discovered that some impossible objects are not really impossible. They can actually be built as solids in three-dimensional space.” – Sugihara

Old time viewers will immediately recognise Ikemath’s work in this #impossible objects gallery below. Randomly placed wristwatch serves as a reminder what we are seeing is real, and is probably used as some sort of signature representing Ikemath’s style. Check the gallery below, and see if you can decode how these objects came to be. It’s obvious they work only from certain perspective, where the solution could easily be seen if only we had access to the behind the scene footage….

Based on the impact our last Impossible Objects Gallery by Ikemath received, it seems you just can’t get enough of these! Pardon me, if this doesn’t sound right – but it turned out our last gallery went viral in record time! Fortunately, there’s more where this came from. Check the following gallery filled with beautiful, previous unseen real-life impossible structures, once again accompanied by Ikemath’s signature wristwatch… Don’t forget to rate, pick your favourite/most illusive specimen and then comment!

A blivet, also known as a poiuyt or even more often refereed to as “The Devil’s Fork” is an undecipherable figure, an optical illusion and an impossible object we’ve encountered many times here on Mighty Optical Illusions blog – yet I feel we’ve never given it proper attention, explained how it works nor talked how it came to be…

In most cases, (yet not always necessarily) it appears to have three cylindrical prongs at one end which mysteriously transform into two rectangular prongs at the other end. In our illusion world, it’s most often showcased in a form of a Roman Columns.

Blivet refers to an indecipherable figure, such as one that can be seen illustrated above (taken from Working Daze comic by John Zakour). One of the earliest appearances can be linked to the March 1965 cover of Mad magazine (below), where it was dubbed the “Three-Pronged Poiuyt“, and has appeared numerous times since then. An anonymously-contributed version described as a “hole location gauge” was printed in the June 1964 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, with the comment that “this outrageous piece of draftsmanship evidently escaped from the Finagle & Diddle Engineering Works”.

The graphic artist M.C. Escher also used these types of figures as the basis for his impossible 3D compositions in many of his woodcut prints, most of which can be easily found if you browse this site’s archives.

In December 1968 American optical designer and artist Roger Hayward wrote “Blivets: Research and Development” for The Worm Runner’s Digest in which he presented interpretations of the blivet…

Let’s take a look at some of the illusions blivet has appeared in, and if this still isn’t enough, feel free to browse some of the links inside this article, or take a glimpse inside our #impossible objects category.

Blivet appeared on the March 1965 cover of Mad magazine, where it was dubbed the “Three-Pronged Poiuyt” (the last six letters on the top row of many Latin-script typewriter keyboards, right to left), and has appeared numerous times since then.

You may accuse me of recycling some already-seen ideas, but I felt obligated to share Jason’s recent submission – one featuring beautiful impossible figures made out of wood. I haven’t had the chance to ask Jason if he made or photographed these himself, but the outcome is either-way perfect! Not sure about you, but I’d be delighted if we could obtain photos of these figures photographed from different, illusion-revealing angle. Let’s see if craftsmen among you are able to replicate these in wood or some other material…?

More often than not, I receive emails from fans all over the world. While most of them are complimentary, thanking me for maintaining this site and expressing gratuity for regular content, I also receive a complaint here and then (mostly addressing my English). Questions and suggestions fly in as well. One that stood out lately was a complimentary email from Agnes, where she also expressed her disappointment regarding solutions often not being included inside the articles. I have to acknowledge this, yet I’ve always felt the solution shouldn’t be handed out on a plate. In my view easy answer degrades the value of a question (or illusion in our case). Somehow I always disliked shortcuts in life. Perhaps this Spartan approach doesn’t work for some, but it certainly helps starting the conversation (comments section!). This also forces you to stop and think about the illusion for a second. After all, isn’t the feeling when you come up with the solution yourself – rewarding by itself?! Having said that, I have to admit many illusions I posted are still a mystery to me. They may appear beautiful or simple, but sometimes even I can’t see the answer. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy reading your comments so much! It’s one of the things that keep me going… Here’s a solution animation that may help with one of our latest posts ;)