Feast Your Eyes on an Optical Illusion Cake
This may be the most delicious optical illusion
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Need a pick-me-up? Why not indulge in a bit of whirling cake? Not just any cake, but one to boggle your mind and trick your eyes, like this one from Alexandre Dubosc that doubles as a zoetrope—a type of optical illusion that looks like a stop-motion animation.
Dubosc is an animator who specializes in “food fascination.” His website describes him as engaged in a game “between the viewer and the intimate objects of our fridge that we think we know.” Melting POP, his most recent zoetrope cake, is no exception.
Before you take a bite of this fanciful creation, here’s the rundown on zoetropes. One of the earliest forms of motion pictures, zoetropes were invented in 1834 by William George Horner and renamed “Zoetrope” by Pierre Desvignes. Old-school zoetropes consisted of a cylinder with vertical slits and a series of sequenced pictures inside. When the cylinder spun, viewers could see an animation.
Like all animation, zoetropes depend on optical illusions and what’s called persistence of vision. When the brain is presented with more than 24 frames per second, it filters out the blank spaces between images and mashes them into one continuous picture. If the images are in a sequence, the brain interprets them as moving rather than static thanks to something called the phi phenomenon.
Dubosc’s artistic vision is sure persistent: Check out his Vimeo channel for more animated deliciousness.
(h/t This is Colossal)
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