Twins unveil brain-bending 'reverspective' painting in Chicago

CHICAGO, May 14 (UPI) -- A pair of identical twin sisters --- an optometry student and an artist -- teamed to create a brain-bending optical illusion "reverspective" painting in Chicago.

Sepideh Omidghaemi, a doctoral student at the Illinois College of Optometry, teamed with twin sister Saeideh Omidghaemi, a Los Angeles-based artist, to create the "Our favorite space" painting, which was unveiled Wednesday at the Chicago college.

The sisters said they studied the work of Patrick Hughes, an English artist who pioneered the reverspective technique in the 1960s.

The sisters said moving around while looking at the painting gives the illusion of peering down an actual hallway due to the reverspective technique causing the eyes of viewers to see the closest objects -- the tips of a trio of pyramids composing the painting's canvas -- as the furthest away.

"When you move, the painting moves with you ... and you have to stop and go back and then they see the movement," Sepideh Omidghaemi told DNAinfo.

"Your mind is shooting [the image] back. It's constantly fighting with you. It sees something and says, 'No, no, we have learned that if things that appear in the distance are coming at me ... that's not how it's supposed to be, so it shoots it back and that's how you get the [perception] of motion."

The sisters, who left Iran for the United States 15 years ago, said they spent about a year researching and testing out techniques for the painting.

"We still don't have the science to understand why this happens to our brain. Why can't we condition ourselves to see the small things in front and see that it's 3-D objects in front instead of in back," Saeideh Omidghaemi told WLS-TV.