"Judge me by my size, do you? Size matters not." — Yoda, Jedi master
SMALL CHANGE
Do you see tiny objects photographed with a macro lens? Look again. This remarkable illusion combines tilt-shift photography—in which the photographer uses selective focus and a special lens or tilted shot angle to make regular objects look toy-sized—with the strategic placement of a giant coin. Art designers Theo Tveterås and Lars Marcus Vedeler, from the Skrekkøgle group, created the enormous 50-cent euro coin from painted and lacquered wood at a 20:1 scale.
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BARBIE TRASHES HER DREAM HOUSE
At first sight, they look like real-life scenes from the television show Hoarders, precleanup. In reality, they are photographs of 1:6 scale dioramas by St. Louis–born artist Carrie M. Becker. She makes the cardboard boxes, garbage bags and other trash herself. The furniture and tiny objects are from Barbie's dream house and a Japanese miniatures company called Re-Ment. Becker filths up the rooms with actual dirt collected from the filter of a DustBuster, using the occasional Re-Ment meatball to simulate dog poop on the floor. When she photographs the scenes without an external reference, our brain relies on our everyday experience and assumes that the minuscule objects are life size. Only in proximity to an extraneous, actual-size object does the illusion fail.
SUPERSIZE ME
You can look 10 pounds thinner with a well-known slimming trick: vertical lines elongate your shape and give you a more svelte appearance, right? Wrong! Vision scientists Peter Thompson and Kyriaki Mikellidou of the University of York in England say instead that it is time to ditch your vertical-striped wardrobe and invest in some horizontal-striped outfits. They found that vertical stripes on clothing make the wearer appear fatter and shorter than horizontal stripes do. Notice that the vertical-striped lady seems to have wider hips than the horizontal-striped model in the accompanying cartoons. The phenomenon is based on the Helmholtz illusion, in which a square made up of horizontal lines appears to be taller and narrower than an identical square made of vertical lines. The original report from 1867 of this illusion contained the intriguing reflection that ladies' frocks with horizontal stripes make the figure look taller. Because the remark ran counter to contemporary popular belief, the York researchers decided to put it to the test, finding that 19th-century German physicist and physician Hermann von Helmholtz did indeed have a great eye for fashion.
FULL MOON
The full moon rising on the horizon appears to be massive. Hours later, when the moon is high overhead, it looks much smaller. Yet the disk that falls on your retina is not smaller for the overhead moon than it is for the rising moon. So why does the overhead moon seem smaller? One answer is that your brain infers the larger size of the rising moon because you see it next to trees, hills or other objects on the horizon. Your brain literally enlarges the moon to fit the context. Look for this effect the next time you see the moon in real life.
BLOWN AWAY
Objects project smaller images on our retinas as they move away from us, which can make it hard to decide if an item is truly small or just far away (as we see in this photograph). Forced perspective photography uses this ambiguity to great effect, while eliminating many of the habitual strategies that our brain uses to distinguish size from distance, such as stereopsis (our visual system can calculate the depth in a scene from the slight differences between our left and right retinal images) and motion parallax (as we move, objects closer to us move farther across our field of view than distant objects do).
TALL AND VENTI
Is your cuppa joe half empty or half full? It depends on your outlook—and on a little twist on the Jastrow illusion, named after Polish-born American psychologist Joseph Jastrow. In this classic illusion, two identical arches positioned in a certain configuration appear to have very different lengths. Magician Greg Wilson and writer and producer David Gripenwaldt realized that Starbucks coffee sleeves have the perfect shape for an impromptu demonstration of the Jastrow illusion, so now you can amaze your office mates at your next coffee break. All you need to do is align the coffee sleeves as in the accompanying photograph and—presto!—your tall cup sleeve is now venti-sized! Your brain compares the upper arch's lower right corner with the lower arch's upper right corner and concludes, incorrectly, that the upper sleeve is shorter than the lower sleeve. We would like to thank magician Victoria Skye for her demonstration of the Jastrow illusion with Starbucks coffee sleeves.
