In addition to rotating the Schröder 3D staircase (equivalent to inverting a 2D figure), careful positioning by the mirror reveals something strange: both perspectives are seen simultaneously where the Gestalt Shift effect has defeated:
The most impressive illusion of the year is a contest held annually by the association Neural Correlate. In it, a jury consisting of many artists, scientists, and neuroscientists from around the world will vote to choose the best entries, meeting the criteria of confusing the human brain. .
The winner of this award is always a highly anticipated hallucination. And this year it was awarded to the 3D Schröder Stairs, designed by Japanese mathematician and psychedelic Kokichi Sugihara.
The Schröder Staircase is actually an illusion created in 1858 by the German scientist Heinrich GF Schröder. However, its classic form is just a 2D black and white drawing. As you can see in the image below.
At first glance, the Schröder staircase is just an ordinary drawing of a staircase going from right to left and from the bottom up. But if you try to look closely at it again, you will notice that it has a second staircase, going from left to right and hanging upside down from the ceiling.
If you still can’t figure it out, just turn your phone upside down and the hidden Schröder Staircase will appear. But the problem is that it only appears for a moment, before returning to the staircase your brain has assigned according to a psychological phenomenon known as Gestalt Shift.
In the end, when you flip the Schröder Stair back and forth like that, it becomes a continuous illusion that the Japanese mathematician Kokichi Sugihara wanted to create.
But Kokichi Sugihara’s take on this competition is that he created a Schröder Staircase in 3D. It is a cardboard cutout according to Japanese 3D paper art so that from a certain angle, the Schröder staircase will appear.
Sugihara said: “My 3D objects also have two interpretations, both are stairs seen from the top of a tube but their orientation changes from side to side when we rotate the object 180 degrees around the axis. straight”.
But just because it looks like that doesn’t mean it really is.
On his website, Sugihara candidly shares how he made this 3D model of the Schröder staircase, so that anyone who knows how to collage can make such a model at home:
The key to this illusion turned out to be this: The staircase looks like a real staircase and has steps, but it’s actually just a flat surface with undulating and shading drawings to fool the market. only senses and brains.
Sugihara cleverly exploited two “hidden corners” in our visual perception process, whereby the brain often makes the assumption that dark colors mean shadows, hints of depth, and often converging lines. used to measure distance.
Therefore, psychedelicists simply blend dark colors and converging lines to let our lazy brains imagine what they want us to see. Sure the illusion we imagine doesn’t exist, but it’s actually very interesting.
“This object is an example of my experimental material for investigating brain behavior, which is capable of misperceiving 2D images as 3D objects when they are embedded in real 3D structures,” explains Sugihara. prefer. ” As a result, we received a new illusion, different from the original Schröder Stairs illusion.”
In addition to rotating the Schröder 3D staircase (equivalent to inverting a 2D figure), careful positioning by the mirror reveals something strange: both perspectives are seen simultaneously where the Gestalt Shift effect has defeated!
Great. Congratulations, Kokichi Sugihara!
To see more of the winners in the 2020 Most Impressive Illusion competition organized by the Neural Corelate association, please click here!