Another visual toy

[jducoeur]

Thanks to fairdice for this pointer to an unsettling optical illusion. It's part of the new generation, that seem to mess with the way the brain processes color to produce bizarrely effective illusions...

Comments

[ladypeyton.livejournal.com]

That's bizarre!

[new-man.livejournal.com]

It's not a new generation of illusions -- although it's an new application. He just uses the persistance of complimentary colors (stare at a red square, look at a white wall, you see a green square).

Reading the tutorial, he just uses the color invert function in Photshop to get a "negative". The black and white image just helps "ground" the afterimage.

[jducoeur]

Interesting. I've never seen the idea used to such powerful effect, so that hadn't occurred to me. (Danger of posting too quickly, and not reading further on...)

[umbran.livejournal.com]

new_man is correct. This isn't about how the brain processes color, so much as how the receptors in the retina do not clear instantly.

[its-just-me.livejournal.com]

That's nifty!

[antoniseb.livejournal.com]

Nice.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Huh. I tried to follow the instructions, and totally failed to see any "color" effect.

[jducoeur]

Interesting. For me, the effect was so vivid that I initially thought it was having me on -- that there was nothing special about the color image. I was *deeply* startled to look back a few seconds later and see that it was actually black and white...

[fairdice.livejournal.com]

You're kidding! Alexx, I bet there's someone in a local visual cognition lab who would like to do a Ph.D. dissertation on you.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

I'm not kidding, but I did misunderstand the instructions, it turns out. When I do what they actually intended, I do see the effect. It vanishes at the tiniest movement though, including just an eye-blink.

[tafkad.livejournal.com]

How utterly delightful!

[vairavi.livejournal.com]

The general consensus in our house is: That's f-ed up! Neat!

[alethea-eastrid.livejournal.com]

The particulaly enthralling thing for me was, I kept stareing at the dot, and let the image resovle slowly back to black and white...but in the process of doing so, it pixilated. Dramatically. As in, ended up looking like those nonsense pattern they use for the "magic eye" type pictures.

And now I have a ghostly yellow caslte-image as I type. wonder how long that's gong to take to clear...