Earlier this year we visited Sanya, Hainan Province, China. There is a huge statue, the South Sea Avalokitesvara (南海观世音菩萨), at Sanya Nanshan Buddhism Cultural Tourism Resort. When we were gazing at the statue on a leaving car on gradually rising road, an unexpected visual illusion took place in which the statue seemed running after us. In this presentation, an optical model is developed to explain the illusion occurred on a moving object leaving in fact but approaching by environmental judgement. Such an interesting illusion analysis will play a significant role in having students understood the main principles in geometrical optics.

Date Published: 16 August 2017
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 10452, 14th Conference on Education and Training in Optics and Photonics: ETOP 2017, 1045262 (16 August 2017); doi: 10.1117/12.2269904

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10452:
14th Conference on Education and Training in Optics and Photonics: ETOP 2017
Xu Liu; Xi-Cheng Zhang, Editor(s)