Excel Optical Illusions

I thought it would be interesting to recreate some famous optical illusions in Excel. So far I've done about a dozen and thought it would be fun to release them on my blog, one each Friday. So here's the first one:

I actually came up with the idea for my Excel 2007 Chess Viewer, while I was crafting this optical illusion. The checkerboard is absolutely square. The bulge is a genuine illusion and is entirely contained inside of an Excel chart. The attached workbook allows the user to remove the small checks and then the illusion vanishes. No VBA.

Enjoy. 

Here's the Excel 2007 workbook.

Here's a workbook for earlier versions of Excel.

--- UPDATE ---

One of my readers, Gerald Higgins, sent me a version of the bulge that he crafted after seeing mine. He used conditional formatting as an alternative method to the chart to produce the image. Considering the limitations of 3 conditional formats in earlier versions of Excel, his effort is remarkable. I particularly like his strategy for getting the ticks to line up properly. Excellent job, Gerald!

Have a look at his: .xls

Here is a list of other Excel Optical Illusions here at Excel Hero:

- Bulging Checkerboard

- Egg Shadow

- Intersection Dots

- Fraser's Spiral

- Pastel Waves

- Ambiguous Cube

- Eye Jitter

- Eye Jitter 2

- Hering Illusion

- Shaded Diamonds

- Stereokinetic Illusion

- Snake Illusion

- Swirling Almonds

- Lilac Chaser

- Counter-Intuitive Illusory Contours

- Swirling Almonds 2

- Breathing Square

- Enigma

- Two Tributes to M.C. Escher

- Two Sinusoids

- Perpetual Collisions

- Freezing Rotation

- Reverse Spoke Illusion

- Swimming Fish

- Mutually Interfering Shapes

- Kaleidoscope Motion

- Curry's Paradox

- Square Circle Spiral

- The Koffka Ring

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