The Illusion of Change

I thought you guys chose a difficult illusion to recreate, and I'm impressed with how much you guys put into it. Even though you guys didn't get to the point that you wanted to, I still think it does a good job of showing the illusion. One thing is, although its supposed to look like its changing as the lighting changes, there was more of a feeling that I saw more of a hidden image and was able to understand it better as the clip went on.
When I looked up visual pareidolia, an example I liked was this one, which you all may have seen before: http://www.all-about-psychology.com/images/face-on-mars.jpg

This is a surprisingly engaging animation! Not sure if my laptop was just playing it slowly but it does seem a bit longer that 5 seconds and I felt like the frames were shifting extremely slow, which kind of took away from the illusion. It also made it harder to understand what was going on. I was definitely confused by the description saying "an image that appears to change without actually changing", because the animation definitely changes, and I think I was expecting a static optical illusion. I really like the interations you guys went though, and appreciate the honesty in what went wrong. I also applaud you for stepping out of your comfort zone in terms of the tools used to create this! Last thing is that Flash is quickly becoming out of date/losing support with browsers, so I'd be cautious using swf files in the future.

While there are many examples of pareidolia, it was interesting to see the illusion displayed with a dynamic component in the form of the changing lighting. I was surprised by how much more interesting this made the animation, which still shows the illusory effect pretty well. The audio component is less remarkable, though that doesn’t mean it was any less effective. Still, I didn’t think the pareidolic(?) effect was as apparent as it could have been. This is just speculation, but maybe the lighting, depth, and shadows actually draw viewers’ attention away from the foreground objects. Without knowing what to look for, it took a couple loops for me to discover the face on my own, since the lighting seemed more important. That being said, I still like the idea of the parts of the face being revealed gradually by the changing light. For a start, maybe you could bring the background closer and tweak the lighting angles to minimize the distracting shadows. Also, I would have looked into different formats for presenting your work. Trying to open the swf file was surprisingly annoying, and it would have been just as effective as a looped video.