If you, like me, are one of today's lucky ten thousand[1], here's some context:
Kokichi Suhihara is an engineering professor who designs 3D objects that create optical illusions, including their mirrored images. Here's his English home page:
So we're looking at a photo of an actual 3D object and its mirrored reflection, which should obviously appear incorrect since, well, the reflection is not apparently mirrored but rather facing the same way as the real object. I think the key to understanding what we're seeing is that the non-mirrored image is also not as it appears. We'd need to see it rotated to understand the actual shape.
Here's a short YouTube video of his "Ambiguous Garage Roof" that I've now watched several times and it keeps blowing my mind:
Funny story: In 1984, my mom, a Computational Geometry researcher, saw a proof [1] in some IEEE journal that she was annoyed with. It seemed way too general and was too easy to disprove, so she did [2], in a subsequent publication, with the author's name in the title.
She later told me he courteously publicized a correction, credited her, and would mail her pre-prints for his papers since. Earlier this year I looked up the claim and counterclaim: Turns out it's Kokichi Sugihara.
I guess in the 80s well-actuallying in Mathematics journals was good form. :)
What's amazing about the Ambiguous Garage is that even after I've seen how the illusion is done, my brain keeps getting fooled. It's one of those things where it's simply impossible not to "see" the illusion even after you understand it.
It reminds me of the Penn and Teller red ball routine where they tell you how it works before they perform it and your brain (well, mine anyway) still won't accept it.
Kokichi Suhihara is an engineering professor who designs 3D objects that create optical illusions, including their mirrored images. Here's his English home page:
http://www.isc.meiji.ac.jp/~kokichis/Welcomee.html
So we're looking at a photo of an actual 3D object and its mirrored reflection, which should obviously appear incorrect since, well, the reflection is not apparently mirrored but rather facing the same way as the real object. I think the key to understanding what we're seeing is that the non-mirrored image is also not as it appears. We'd need to see it rotated to understand the actual shape.
Here's a short YouTube video of his "Ambiguous Garage Roof" that I've now watched several times and it keeps blowing my mind:
https://youtu.be/KtA6u1HIqbg
[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/