A Paper-Thin Illusion: Make Your Own Magnetlike Slopes [Slide Show]

With a few supplies and some careful cutting and pasting, you can build the gravity-defying structure that won the 2010 Best Illusion of the Year Contest . Created by Japanese mathematical engineer Kokichi Sugihara, the magnetlike slopes illusion is cleverly designed to make marbles roll “uphill.” It’s a trick of perspective: The slopes actually tilt downward, but they are supported by leaning columns that look straight when viewed from a specific vantage point. Sugihara discovered the illusion accidentally while feeding 3-D line drawings of “impossible” objects into a computer program designed to interpret them as solid structures

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A Paper-Thin Illusion: Make Your Own Magnetlike Slopes [Slide Show]