As it is completely a part of my essential nature, I have chosen to go with the outright most dark and creepy project that was readily available to me. Please, journey with me if you will into the realm of Malperception.
This is a site that wishes to help shatter the objectivism and logical positivism that has been rampant in Western thought for about the last century. For those of you who do not study philosophy, logical positivism is essentially the idea that reality is completely objective, and that our senses do a pretty darn good job of informing us of how the universe actually is. However, as we begin to dig deeper into the hard problem that is consciousness, we are beginning to understand that perhaps seeing is not believing. The editorial statement immediately sucks you right in by basically explaining that everything you know is wrong. Please enter if you dare. I absolutely love the dark feel they were going for on this site and the editorial statement, a segment one might expect to be dry, gets the dark ball rolling.
The website’s interface is mind numbingly simple to use, as there are thirteen examples of perceptual phenomena that blows the lid off of what we would perceive to be normal. There are some (rather) irrelevant and (often) disturbing images on each of the different subsections, like this one:
The content on this site is insanely interesting, as it pokes… no, throws daggers at our preconceived notions of what we thought was real. I would highly encourage anyone to check it out. If reading about creepy phenomenon is not enough to pique your interest, then you will be happy to find out that there are visual demonstrations for each of the phenomena! At the bottom of each page, you can click on a link that brings you to an interactive page that allows you to experience that perceptual phenomena that defies reality as we know it. After you have had your fun playing with all of the different visual representations, you can get a little more academic and check out the three commentaries at the bottom which puts more of an academic spin on all of this madness.
This project is a winner for me, and I’ll just lay down the philosophical principle of Ockham’s razor by declaring “the simpler an interface is, the better.” There really is no need for a dazzling interface for this, as it may have just overcomplicated the incredible phenomenon and distracted from the sites overall meaning. I’m sure the designers intended to make it this way, as if to say “why do we need a flashy interface? The information speaks for itself.”