June 7, 2015

Countdown to the World's 11th Annual Best Illusion of the Year Contest!

This Thursday and Friday is the launch of this year's Best Illusion of the Year Contest, hosted by the Neural Correlate Society, is now an annual online event, in which anybody with an internet connection (that means YOU!) can vote to pick the Top 3 Winners from the current Top 10 List.

By Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

Ten novel illusions, submitted from five different countries, and selected by an international judge panel from dozens of entries, will compete for first, second, and third placement on June 11^th-12^th. The final rankings will be decided by worldwide online voting.

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The winning illusions will receive a $3,000 award for 1^st place, a $2,000 award for 2^nd place, and a $1,000 award for 3^rd place.

Worldwide voting will take place on the Best Illusion of the Year Contest website, from 7pm EST June 11^th to 7pm EST June 12^th. The Top 10 finalist illusions, listed below, will be publicly revealed at that time!

Masashi Atarashi: “Snow Blind Illusion”. Physics teacher at Aichi Prefectural Gojo Senior High School (Japan)

Luke Bashford and Carsten Mehring: “The third hand illusion”. Bernstein Center Freiburg, University of Freiburg (Germany)

Marco Bertamini and Nicola Bruno: “The Honeycomb Illusion”. University of Liverpool (UK)

Christopher Blair, Lars Strother, and Gideon Caplovitz: “The Wandering Circles”. University of Nevada, Reno (USA)

Nicolas Davidenko: ”Mind-Controlled Motion”. University of California, Santa Cruz (USA)

Rosa Lafer-Sousa: ”Disambiguating #theDress”. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)

Michael Pickard: “The Day it Rained on Lowry”. VisuallyDirectedDesign.com (UK)

Arthur Shapiro: “The Star Wars Scroll Illusion”. American University (USA)

Kokichi Sugihara” “Ambiguous Garage Roof”. Meiji University (Japan)

Mark Vergeer: “Splitting Colors”. KU Leuven (Belgium)

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