The café wall illusion is an optical illusion first described by Professor Richard Gregory. His colleague observed this effect in the tiles of the wall of a café at the bottom of St Michael’s Hill, Bristol. See Wikipedia article on the illusion.
Hard on the death of Jacques Bertin, Richard Gregory’s death on 17th May has just been announced. An esteemed scientist, he had a remarkable ability to make his knowledge accessible, most notably in Eye and Brain: the psychology of seeing, first published in 1966 and passing through five editions, and the Oxford Companion to the Mind, first published in 1987. I found both of these useful together with Illusion in Nature and Art with Ernst Gombrich in 1983 when developing my PhD. And Richard was kind enough to write to me when I questioned him about one of the ideas in his publications.
- Obituary on Bristol University site.
- Obituary in the Guardian.
- Wikipedia article.
- Richard Gregory site.
No comments:
Post a Comment