Optical illusions questions

There are two illusions associated with the Ames Room. First the room appears cubic when viewed monocularly from a special viewing point (the true shape of the room is trapezoidal). Secondly, within an Ames Room people or objects can appear to grow or shrink when moving from one corner to the other.

The Fata Morgana occurs because rays of light are bent when they pass through air layers of different temperatures in a steep thermal inversion, where an atmospheric duct has formed. It significantly distorts the object on which it is based, often such that the object is completely unrecognizable. The Fata Morgana may be seen on land or at sea, in polar regions, or in deserts. It may involve almost any kind of distant objects, including boats, islands, and the coastline.

The effect is similar to irisation. Iridescent clouds are a diffraction phenomenon caused by small water droplets or small ice crystals individually scattering light. Larger ice crystals do not produce iridescence, but can cause halos, a different phenomenon.

Rayleigh scattering, named after the British physicist Lord Rayleigh (John William Strutt), is an elastic scattering of light or other electromagnetic radiation by particles much smaller than the wavelength of the radiation.

This map of Africa is rotated so the continent shape resembles Australia.

This is Australia map, with north at the bottom side.

In this scintillating grid illusion, dark dots seem to appear and disappear randomly. Various theories have been proposed to explain it. It may be caused by the mechanism of lateral inhibition (the capacity of an excited neuron to reduce the activity of its neighbors).

This is known Ebbinghaus illusion. Although commonly thought of as an illusion of size, recent work suggests that the critical factor in the illusion is not the size, but the distance of the surrounding circles. In a similar way, the Moon appears larger on clear sky when it's close to the horizon line.

A Hybrid Image is an optical illusion developed at MIT in which an image can be interpreted in one of two different ways depending on viewing distance. In order to see Marylin clearly, you need to move away of the screen

In this Ehrenstein illusion the sides of a square placed inside a pattern of concentric circles take an apparent curved shape. But in reality, the sides are straight.