As a former student of Andy‘s, i was indoctrinated into believing the power of educational software, but frankly, most tools used to teach tend to bore me to tears and most uses of Flash/Java to explain concepts have about the same education weight as a CS15 skit. That’s not to say that they’re bad, just that they’re not that informative.

For that reason, i am pleasantly amazed by how impressive these perception illusion Flash demos are. As an undergraduate, i did a lot of studying about perception and color and whatnot, so i’ve always been particularly psyched by Adelson‘s research on perception and lightness. But these examples make the concepts clear and powerful, far more than the terrible text-book equivalents. Yay for really good educational uses of Flash!