I couldn’t believe it either, but I just measured the value in Photoshop: Red 0, Green 255, Blue 150 on both. Crazy.
The reason why we are perceiving one colour as different colours is because of the other colours surrounding the stripes. Each eye has six to seven million cones, which are concentrated in a central yellow spot known as the macula (I recently got mine lasered to fix some leaking blood vessels). These cones measure colour in different wavelengths, overlapping in some of them. Our brain then compares those signals in an antagonistic manner, measuring differences in wavelengths between them. When some colours are combined, the brain can’t process the info from the cones correctly and we simply get confused. [gsu and Techi]
Bastard Sheep
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 9:28 AMThis very same method has been used brilliantly to create an awesome map of the world that I used as my desktop at work for a while.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/gallery_directory.cfm?photo_id=5B62A46D-F560-251B-B9205E05F5185BF5
vin
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 9:36 AMgtfo!
villainsoft
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 9:52 AMSame principle is used in dithering and halftoning. Using a smaller number of colors in different freqeuncies and distribution to give the illusion of more colors.
This is nothing new, its been used in printing and computer graphics for decades.
nick
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 10:52 AMthe antialiasing of the ‘blue’ stripe contains lots of darker blue pixels fools.
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part illusion, part truth
Russ
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 12:16 PMThe full sized image has no anti aliasing in the spiral… still totally works…
ed power
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 1:47 PMIts actually the edging between the colors that influences. Its part of the rendering. Magnify the image and look at the edge of the blocks to see the effect.
ozoneocean
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 1:59 PMNo, that’s because the article preview image is a jpg. Click on it to see the original gif image. Here’s the link:
http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2011/09/sick-illusion.gif
ozoneocean
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 1:56 PMYa, it works. The shrunken down image as it appears in the preview here ruins the effect.There are only 3 colours; green, orange, and magenta. In the green spiral the green is crossed with orange and in “blue” spiral the green is crossed with magenta.
I suppose as a lightwave mixing thing, magenta has some blue in it and orange has yellow in it, so the magenta changes the green to look bluer and the orange makes the green look yellower.
Lillee
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 3:15 PMI think I’m going to throw up
bez
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 3:58 PMDoesn’t work for me. Still looks green, no blue in sight. Might have something to do with me being color blind?
bez
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 4:00 PMI also don’t see any spiral affect. Yes it looks like a spiraling tunnel but that’s it. Doesn’t make me feel sick at all.
pat
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 4:50 PMits true. I didnt believe it myself, till i loaded the image up in Photoshop and checked the colours. They are the same. Just blew my mind.
Hew
Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 6:36 PMI couldn’t afford photoshop to prove it so I used my fingers.
WTF
Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 8:13 AMHold Ctrl,and mouse wheel scroll up and zoom in in the top left where there’s the most green. There’s enough of the blue there when enlarged to make it green, too.