A new toy for the Lounge. Anamorphic illusions.

[Baitball Blogger]

&feature=g-logo

[surrealAmerican]

1. I was completely fascinated by these sorts of perspective tricks ...

... when I was a teen.

[Baitball Blogger]

3. I was a teen thirty years ago.

We didn't have the internet back then, nor all the neat visuals.

Rubik's Cube wasn't even mass marketed yet!

[struggle4progress]

7. Lots of folk had seen Rubik's cubes in US stores by mid-1981. I remember

taking a class with the (now deceased) graph theorist Tory Parsons that year, and he told us he had designed an algorithm for solved the cube and offered to share it with the students in the class

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=82296&picked=prox&preflayout=flat

[Baitball Blogger]

8. I was already over twenty one by then.

The google said it was invented in 1974. But it wasn't mass marketed for several more years. mid-1981 sounds right.

[surrealAmerican]

9. So was I.

There were plenty of neat visuals if you knew where to look.

Anamorphic projections were also all the rage during the renaissance, and again in the nineteenth century.

[Baitball Blogger]

10. I do remember optical illusions.

Do you see an old hag or a young woman? But nothing of the caliber of that video. Of course, I was raised overseas where there were two Spanish Channels and one US military channel that showed movies that were ten to twenty years old. I was watching the Movie Classic Channel before Ted Turner earned his first million!

[surrealAmerican]

11. I remember getting a few books out of the Dover catalog ...

... that were reprints of 19th century parlor games, where you used a mirror rolled into a tube to "reveal" the otherwise indiscernible image (usually a black and white drawing). From there, I did my own research, and found older images. A lot of renaissance murals employed the technique for works that were high up on walls or ceilings, and would only be viewed from below.

[Baitball Blogger]

12. You were definitely on the right track.

In my teens I was still terrified my stomach would begin rumbling during class.

I admired my older sister because she was the artist. She said I drew very anally. I tried to pick up her calligraphic way of writing, and years later, someone asked me how I came around to writing my letter "E"s like I'm left-handed. It was peculiar because I'm right-handed.

I realized now, that if I possessed the confidence and reference points that I have today, I might have been able to develop the kind of things that seem to come naturally to artistic people.

[lunatica]

2. Thanks!

[Baitball Blogger]

4. My pleasure!

[CBGLuthier]

5. Very Nice. I always enjoyed the approach the Quays took to exploring Anamorphosis

[Baitball Blogger]

6. This sort of thing should be part of a required Art class.

This, and a class on Statistical Analysis.