Optical illusion

[telophase]

Messing with your brain is neat!

Stare at the dot as the colors get imprinted on your eyes. When the animated .gif flips over, you'll see the building in color. It's not in color. :)





From here. Another version of this is here, where you mouse over the pic to change it after staring. That page also has a tutorial on how to make your own.

Hm, let me see....

Click on the small pic to load the full-size gif and start the animation. Then stare at the black dot until the picture changes. :)

Comments

[sophisted]

I don't think the second one is working, but I'll keep staring until it does... *dedicated*

[telophase]

Phhoey, for some reason it uploaded as non-animated! Keep staring while I work it out...

ETA: Reload and try again. XD

[jackandahat]

Saw this on my network page - I'm curious, what colours are we meant to see? Because... it looks like a blue and greyish picture of a building, then a black and white of the same building. What is everyone else seeing?

[telophase]

What happens is that when you stare at it without moving your head (and blinking your eyes a lot might stop it happening, too) , is that the color leave a negative image on your retina. When the picture flips to black and white and you haven't moved your eyes, those negative-image colors make the B&W image look like a normal color image, sometimes fleetingly.

I don't know how variant this is for individuals - the comments on the post at Richard Wiseman's blog show that some people may ahve a harder time seeing it than others.

You can check the Gallery on the Wikipedia Afterimage page and see if it works for you in B&W (stare at the B&W pics for 20-30 seconds, then quickly look at a white surface and see if you see the image in negative.)

[jackandahat]

The afterimage one works for me - that used to come up in puzzle/magic books a lot when I was a kid. I just don't think I'm very good with colours - that's why I wondered what colours people saw - what colours are the walls?

[telophase]

The building on the left is a kind of dull yellow, and the one on the right is a brick red. The building in the middle is a sort of faint blue glass.

The trees don't get colored very much for me, they're a really desaturated green, but I saw one of the comments on it that said the green trees were much more visible to them than any of the other colors, so I guess there's a lot of individual variation!

[jackandahat]

Ah! That's interesting - now I'm curious how much variation there is, and what some of the variables are (like age, sex, glasses-wearers and not). It's an interesting experiment.

[green_knight]

Oh, this is way cool. The first three or four rounds I got a flicker of colour - enough to know that there was colour, but unable to see which colours. Once I read the explanation, and playing with your image, I was able to hold it longer, by staring blankly at the screen (I'm in a library. This is kind of embarassing.) Afterwards, the top image was easier to hold.

[pseudo_tsuga]

I only saw the colors for a moment, but i made me gasp since I was another window when it loaded so I saw the B&W image first. I love optical illusions. :D

[celestriad.livejournal.com]

that is so neat!

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

I love those! I saw a regular one with the American flag you had to stare at for a couple of minutes.