Tag Archives: Optical illusions

Trompe-l’œil

Trompe-l’œil (French meaning for “deceive the eye”) is an art technique that uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects exist in three dimensions. Forced perspective is a comparable illusion in architecture. History in painting Though the phrase, which can also be spelled without the hyphen…

Trompe-l’œil

Neon color spreading

Neon color spreading (also referred to as neon-like color spreading) is an optical illusion in the category of transparency effects, characterized by fluid borders between the edges of a colored object and the background in the presence of black lines. The illusion was first documented in 1971 and was eventually…

Neon color spreading

The dress viral phenomenon

“The dress” is a photograph that became a viral Internet sensation on 26 February 2015, when viewers disagreed over whether the colors of the item of clothing depicted were black and blue or white and gold. The phenomenon revealed differences in human color perception which have been the subject of…

The dress viral phenomenon

Benham’s top

Benham’s top, also called Benham’s disk, is named after the English newspaper-man, amateur scientist, and toymaker Charles Benham, who in 1895 sold a top painted with the pattern shown. When the disk is spun, arcs of pale color, called Fechner colors or pattern-induced flicker colors (PIFCs), are visible at different…

Benham’s top

Bezold effect

The Bezold effect is an optical illusion, named after a German professor of meteorology, Wilhelm von Bezold (1837–1907), who discovered that a color may appear different depending on its relation to adjacent colors. It happens when small areas of color are interspersed. An assimilation effect called the von Bezold spreading…

Bezold effect

Afterimage

An afterimage is an image that continues to appear in one’s vision after the exposure to the original image has ceased. An afterimage may be a normal phenomenon (physiological afterimage) or may be pathological (palinopsia). Illusory palinopsia may be a pathological exaggeration of physiological afterimages. Afterimages occur because photochemical activity…

Afterimage

Color constancy

Color constancy is an example of subjective constancy and a feature of the human color perception system which ensures that the perceived color of objects remains relatively constant under varying illumination conditions. A green apple for instance looks green to us at midday, when the main illumination is white sunlight,…

Color constancy

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