Jul 5, 2012
What to see
Usually, we are remarkably adept at detecting and identifying surface boundaries despite incomplete optical information. However, in “breathing illusions”, rigidly rotating surfaces appear to pulsate or deform, even though a straightforward process of geometrical interpolation across space would reconstruct the veridical surface boundary. It is generally believed that such nonrigid outcome depends on a failure to apply a rigidity constraint across spatiotemporal discontinuities.