He needs a different filming setup for this to work as well as it should - as it stands, focus blur kind of gives stuff away (you could see this even in the thumbnail). Cool anyways.

*music

Adding video to channels (Music) - requested by ant.

I was going to say the exact same thing. Shame really.

With some sort of Maxwellian View he might be able to increase the depth of field enough while maintaining a collection area large enough to get a decent exposure. I'd have to think about it. You are right though, the defocus cue is strong, although I'm surprised it wasn't strong enough to overcome weaker cues like familiar object size.

Also, this should be tagged Science, not Magic.

Science IS magic

That's what I was thinking too, he needed to stop the aperture down.

Yes, DOF is way too shallow. But he's pretty close to doing it right. It reminds me a bit of early Ernie Kovacs "Eugene"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EHiq2SzmOs

You oneupmanship nerds shut up. :-) I giggled at being fooled.

It's not just DOF. He appears to be using some kind of wide angle lens that is distorting the long straight lines in the field of view. Particularly the long vertical lines of the architecture are all somewhat concave to the centre of the scene while the "portrait on the wall" is distorted differently, probably from the top being closer to the lens than the bottom. So good concept but photography sucks.

The shadow of the large cup in the background against the wall places it firmly in the background, as does the different lighting. This is a good idea, quite well done, but these things need to be sooo well done to fool people these days.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'asumption, illusion' to 'assumption, illusion, assumptions' - edited by Fusionaut

jeez, tough crowd.

The shadow of the huge cup on the wall was a serious problem...