A mathematician named Kokichi Sugihara has won the Best Illusion of the Year, an award handed out by the Vision Sciences Society. The video below is a demonstration of the winning illusion, a gravity defying mind-bender that doesn’t reveal its secrets until the base is turned. There is no trickery here, no CGI, and no magnets.
Sugihara’s illusion was inspired by a computer program he wrote that turns two-dimensional line drawings into renderings of three-dimensional solids. The program worked beautifully for everyday solids, but Sugihara wondered what would happen if he fed his program some drawings of ‘impossible figures’, of the kind that might appear in an artwork by M. C. Escher.
“Most of the time, the software rejected the input,” Sugihara says. “But once in a while it found a solution.” The result was a number of figures that appeared to move in unnatural ways, including the gravity-defying balls that took the prize.
