I was hanging out with my friend and fellow blogger, Dr. Ted Eytan this evening. We were talking about the problem of overweight and obesity in America and he showed me this iPhone image of a small and large ice-cream cone that he and his friend bought at McDonald’s recently. He asked me to try to figure out which was which.
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Left is large; right is small.
The ice cream in the cone on the right has one layer gently stacked on top of the previous layer. It looks tall, but there are only 4 swirls, compared to 6 swirls on the left. The center of the right-hand cone is probably hollow, creating the illusion of more ice cream than is actually there; on the left it’s not hollow and has a larger diameter. Also, there is probably no ice cream down inside of the cone on the right. As you lick the ice cream, your tongue pushes ice cream down into the cone so you never realize that it was hollow. The cone on the left was probably packed full of ice cream by the server. You’d have to weigh the cones to see how much they really have in them.
Optical illusions are easy to create. Servers are taught to feed the customer’s eye.