Akiyoshi Kitaoka is and has been the king of optical illusions for as long as I can remember. My undergraduate thesis in 2005 was based on his work [0], and even at that time he had a huge body of work.

[0] I demonstrated exploiting various optical illusions to create depth and animation effects. I thought I was going to revolutionize game graphics on mobile devices! And then mobile devices got GPUs shortly thereafter.