This is one of my favorite optical illusions, because even when you know specifically HOW IT WORKS, it's still hard to make your brain believe it. The image below is real-world video, but you're being tricked into believing it's an elaborate miniature by the DIORAMA EFFECT. Let's talk about it.

What's happening in these videos: 1. Playback is happening at higher speed than recording, simulating herky-jerky stop-motion photography. 2. A high angle is being used to force perspective. Drone footage works great! 3. The top & bottom are being digitally blurred to simulate macro lens DoF.

Depth of field (DoF) is inversely proportional to magnification in macro lenses, so magnified things have blurry foreground & background. We can simulate that digitally with simple blur regions. This cityscape video uses a tilted blur line, which still 'works', but looks slightly different.

We often call this "tilt-shift miniature-faking" referring to a photographic technique where lenses aren't in line with the sensor, which was used to manually create the upper/lower blurring effect in the era before inexpensive digital manipulation. Here's before/after digital blurring effects.

Of course, the alternative theory: that teeny, tiny people exist in a teeny, tiny world with teeny, tiny cars and teeny, tiny trains... makes more sense to my stupid lizard-brain, and I'd appreciate it if you'd all just play along. 😜