Test your brain with this colourful illusion
Optical illusions can be a fun way to test your vision, and this latest one is no different.
In the below image, created by David Novick, the levitating spheres might seem like they are red, purple, or green at first, but if you look closely, you will spot their real colour.
The spheres are actually all the same shade of beige, and are an example of the phenomenon known as the Munker-White illusion.
How does the illusion actually work?
David Novick, who is also a professor of engineering education and leadership at the University of Texas, said it is because “our acuity for shape is better than our acuity for colour, which means that we perceive the shapes with more detail and the colours with less detail.”
He told Science Alert that, though the outlines of the spheres look identical, which they are, “the colour sort of bleeds over, or assimilates, to adjacent spaces”.
The illusion relies on the hue of the stripes in the foreground rather than the colours behind the spheres.
It works as the colour of the spheres gets “pulled” closer to the colour of the stripes that cross over them in the foreground, which warp our perception of the actual hue of the spheres.
There's a great article by @NicolettaML about my research on illusions now posted at @LiveScience: https://t.co/45T2TnLOHG.
— David Novick (@NovickProf) May 19, 2021
So, removing the crisscrossing stripes will also remove the illusion, leaving only identical beige balls behind.
Novick shares around two new illusions every week to his Twitter account, and has found that some of his older posts will get rediscovered, go viral, and sometimes make the news.