Craig McCahill and I've been experimenting with Aude Oliva's Dr. Angry and Mr. Smiles illusion. This allows us to make portraits that look different when viewed at different distances.

Craig created the David & Adriana portrait:

Each of the images above is the same image scaled to different sizes. As you move back from the screen you will see the largest images turn from David to Adriana. This need not be on a computer screen it works equally well in print.

We exhibited this image at the Curiosity Collective Show, Ipswich, 2nd - 6th August 2006.

This image is available via flickr and we've released it under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license, which means you can use it in pretty much any way you like. Of course we'd be very interested to hear how!

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It's relatively straightforward to start making these images yourself, here's a self-portrait I created:

So if you step back from the screen you'll see me facing to the side, come forward and I turn and smile. Squinting works too.

It's pretty easy to do, I took these two images:

Then in Photoshop to the serious one I applied a gaussian blur, to the smiling one I did a high-pass filter and I got these two images:

I then put the two together as two layers and changed the opacity.