Optical illusion ramps by Ushanka

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Optical illusion ramps

Ushanka

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Published on February 22, 2012

Description

The blog said someone should make these so I did.

I had this model sitting on my hard drive since Christmas 2010, completely forgotten until this blogpost: blog.thingiverse.com/2012/02/21/oo-someone-make-one-of-these/

One hour on the Thing-O-Matic and here we are: youtube.com/watch?v=mebIrOiDggw

It's a very different experience, seeing the model in person. The illusion is not convincing at all for the two-eyed among us.

Instructions

If you have two eyes, you're going to have to wink to see the illusion.

There are no extreme overhangs, but the trade-off is that the two shortest ramps are too small to roll things on. Folks with more filament on-hand than I do ought to scale the model up.

Here, have a video! youtube.com/watch?v=mebIrOiDggw

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tombou on February 25, 2012 said:

It's really funny :-D But it take a while before I saw the effect. The trick I've found is close an eye and you will see the truth. But unfortunately, there was no cooling abd the ramps aren't beautiful as the picture. Still I can get the effect!

elspeth on February 23, 2012 said:

woohoo :-D

cymon on February 22, 2012 said:

You could roll BBs down it at this size.

laird on February 22, 2012 said:

This is very cool - and impressive how fast you created it!

Do you mind uploading the "source" files? I'd like to play around with this a bit, and it'd be convenient to work with the original shapes rather than the STL.

Ushanka on February 23, 2012 said:

I'm happy to upload source files! This was designed in Solid Edge, so the original file will not be of use to most. I'll tell you how I made it, but I can't figure out how to replicate the process in OpenSCAD, so ymmv.

The base and the outermost ends of each arm are normal, that is, oriented just as they would be if the ramps did point upward. The base is a Swiss cross. The "center" square is a few mm offset from center and lowered. I drew lines to connect the center square to the center of the cross: http://i.i
mgur.com/4vOuI.png

That gives me the four rectangular profiles on the ends of each arm, and four rectangular profiles at the center of each arm. I built a swept protrusion from the outer to the inner rectangle on each arm (that's the part I don't know how to do in SCAD).