The 'Illusions of the Year' winners will blow your mind

The 'Illusions of the Year' winners will blow your mind

The 'Illusions of the Year' winners will blow your mind

And you thought the blue/black/gold/white dress was a head pest.

The following assembly aren't created by special effects studios or built with big budgets. They are simple optical illusions that show just how unreliable your ocular senses are.



The work of secondary school physics teachers, university research groups and hobbyists, these are the finalists of the 2015 Best Illusion of the Year Contest. The winning effort, Mark Vergeer's "Splitting Colors", makes 'The Dress' look like a childish party trick. 

Check out the most mind-crushing...


Spitting Colors

Mark Vergeer (Winner)

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Ambiguous Garage Roof

Kokichi Sugihara (Second place)

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The Day it Rained on Lowry

Michael Pickard (Third place)


Mind-controlled motion

Nicolas Davidenko, Yeram Cheong, and Jacob Smith (Finalists)


Snow Blind illusion

Masashi Atarashi (Finalist)


The Wandering Circles

Christopher Blair, Lars Strother, and Gideon Caplovitz (Finalists)

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The Honeycomb Illusion

Marco Bertamini and Nicola Bruno (Finalists)

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Disambiguating #theDress

Rosa Lafer-Sousa (Finalist)

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The third hand illusion

 Luke Bashford and Carsten Mehring (Finalists)

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The Star Wars Scroll Illusion

Arthur Shapiro (Finalist)

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Mind blown.

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Marc Chacksfield
Content Director

As Content Director of Shortlist, Marc likes nothing more than to compile endless lists of an evening by candlelight. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.