The Oxford Compendium of Visual Illusions

Visual illusions are well-known in magic and popular culture, but there is a serious academic and research side to them, of interest to psychologists, neurophysiologists, optometrists and computer science specialists. This compendium brings together a wide range of current thinking and research on and into visual illusions, showing that the cross-disciplinary area has grown in recent years, building (in terms above all in computer technology applications and quantitative analysis) on many traditional insights and models from the past.

Formally recorded interest in visual illusions dates from before the early nineteenth century (as in Purkinje’s 1823 work on subjective visual illusions,...