Manasori Idesawa

I offer now another image from Chater of reference 2, this one from one Masanori Idesawa, clearly a more reticent chap than Chater as all that I can find out about him is that he probably works at reference 1.

An image which I found even more striking than that at reference 2, an image which seems to have a life out of all proportion to its simplicity. If one looks carefully, one even seems to see the boundary of the white billiard ball, even where it is not being supported by the spikes. Right we have just the spikes, rearranged, ball vanished. A ball which was a product of our unconscious processing, the brain's best guess at what is going on out there.

From where I move onto a thought experiment. On the assumption that one finds some way to suspend the spikes in space, could one create the same illusion using real spikes, in three dimensions?

First attempt, the spikes are bits of black card, arranged in space in the right positions, perhaps against a white background with us looking at them from three or four feet away. I imagine that one's reaction would be to move one's head around a bit, with quite small movements revealing the cards. Would there have been a transient illusion of ball?

Second attempt, the spikes are actual black spikes, arranged in space in the right positions. But while the ones in front could be spikes entire, the ones at the back would have to had their bases cut off in the right way to emulate the occlusion of the white ball which is not actually there. Or perhaps, even, occlusion of spike against spike. Such an arrangement might stand up to very small head movements, but as the movements got larger one would see that the occlusion of the spikes at the back was not changing in the way that it should. But again, would there have been a transient illusion of ball?

What if one got really clever and got the shape of the spikes to change with movements of the head and eyes? Not too difficult these days to get a computer to track your movements and compute what the spikes should look like. Not so clear that we can manage dynamic spikes, talking to the computer over the wifi.

Maybe we should start with a two dimensional image on a computer screen and get that image to change as we changed to position of our head, as if it were real?

Do I see a project for a bright young thing from our university of creation coming on? Some of these arty types are quite interested in visual illusions and it would be interesting to see what could be done.

Reference 1: https://www.uec.ac.jp/eng/.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-myth-of-unconscious.html.

Reference 3: https://www.uca.ac.uk/.