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Shady Optical Illusion

Shady Optical Illusion
Here's a simple yet surprising optical illusion that can be made within minutes. It involves four different shades of blue that border each other. The shades go from lightest to darkest when viewed from left to right.

The illusion comes into play when an object is placed along the borders of each successive shade. Something strange occurs with our perception of the obvious difference in shades. In fact, neighboring shades appear to be precisely the same!

Here's a video that showcases the full effect of the illusion:


 
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Step 1What You Need

What You Need
Sometimes simple is better. For this project, only the following items are necessary:

1) A sheet of 8.5" x 11" paper
2) Scissors
3) Pencil
4) A program that you can draw in (i.e. Photoshop, Paint, etc.)
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20 comments
Oct 25, 2009. 6:16 PMWallaceTheSane says:
Wow. I can't believe I've never seen this done before. I had a class on optical illusions. This is the best I've seen yet. When you took the last pencil away, I actually watched the colors diverge. 

I wouldn't be surprised if this was a pre-processing phenomenon, related to the cells near the eye that encode information for the brain. They perform lots of strange compression schemes on all our input data, and many of them are line-based.
Oct 30, 2009. 6:34 PMWallaceTheSane says:
There is no end to the fascinating world of brain tricks and optical illusions. The most disturbing (or awesome, depending on your POV) optical illusion they showed in class was a video. We were told to watch a short video closely, because something was about to happen. Of about 23 or so people, nobody could tell the teacher what had changed about the image we were looking at (a forest scene). He backed up the scene to the beginning, and there was a river there all of the sudden. By the last frame, there was no river. The damn thing
dissapeared literally before our eyes. It just became less and less opaque, but it was timed perfectly. Any faster and we would have seen it. It blew our minds.

The class was called "Introduction to Cognitive Science." We were told that very few schools teach Cognitive Science explicitly. It was the absolute best class I have ever taken. On of my projects was to design the neural architecture of an insect. I recommend taking a class on it, or reading a book about it if you can.

Cheers! 
Oct 30, 2009. 10:09 PMWallaceTheSane says:
Hmmm...still looking for that video. It's hard to find.

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/
http://www.johnsadowski.com/big_spanish_castle.html#
Jan 20, 2012. 10:44 PMor_ford98 says:
stilll looking? have you found it yet? O.o
Oct 29, 2009. 3:15 PMeulaliaaaa! says:
Wow.  All you do is cover the line. 

:-O

What if you covered ALL the lines?  THAT would be interesting.  I'll try that.
Jan 20, 2012. 10:44 PMor_ford98 says:
tried yet? hehe :)
Nov 24, 2010. 7:48 PMzypher3.14 says:
HOW do you think of this stuff?!?!
Nov 20, 2010. 10:44 PMPuzzledd says:
That's awesome!
Oct 5, 2009. 9:17 PMKarroo Oakey says:
H?uh ..... Please excuse me while I wash my eyeballs. My lenses must be dirty! Good one!
Oct 5, 2009. 1:27 PMKiteman says:
Oh...

That is...

...gosh!

(Can anybody explain this? There must be a huge project on colour-perception in this for any college or university students out there!)
Oct 5, 2009. 1:29 PMKiteman says:
(I've got to admit, I didn't believe it at first, so I tested it on the screen with the final image from step 2 and used one of Kitewife's knitting needles to cover the boundaries.)
Oct 5, 2009. 1:48 PMKoosie says:
Woah, I doth not believith mine eyez! Freakith out, I didst :)
Oct 5, 2009. 2:02 PMcowscankill says:
Aaahh?! That is nuts!
Oct 5, 2009. 1:59 PMLuminousObject says:
Dude, thats crazy!

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