This is one of the best optical illusions ever; click here and then select "Illusion3".
In the example I linked to above, even though the absolute color in the center of the structure is the same in both pictures, they appear quite different in context. This kind of optical trickery makes you wonder what other kinds of illusions occur in everyday life that we're not aware of. For example, in the case of wealth, when a person travels from a country with a high monthly salary to a country with a low monthly salary, the amount of money in their personal bank account remains the same but the perception of their own wealth is quite different.
It makes you realize how much affect context has on the way we process information.
p.s. While searching on Google for a suitable picture for the bottom of this blog entry, I stumbled upon an amusing and slightly racy optical illusion. Click here to see it.
p.p.s. Some more brilliant optical illusions are here and here.
My eyes may be different from your eyes, but the Example 1 is a joke, and obviously a bot of tom-foolery has been embedded into the flash scripting/programming. Take a piece of paper/playing cards or anything opaque other than what the website gives you and its easy to see that they are the different. The second one, well maybe. The third has to do with the color filters and well, your guess is as good as mine.
Posted by: Nicolas Oliverie | Sep 12, 2005 at 07:11 PM
Hi Nic,
It's actually not a joke. Try the swatch that is provided with example one!
Cheers,
Graham
Posted by: Graham Glass | Sep 12, 2005 at 07:29 PM
I couldn't believe it either, so I used a screen grabber to copy the images and then used a graphics editor to determine the colors. To my surprise, the colors were indeed the same.
Cheers,
David Weber
(former student)
Posted by: David Weber | Sep 16, 2005 at 08:19 AM