Cool Optical Illusion

[Bill]

Fixate your gaze on the center of one of the figures and stare at it for some time (20-30 seconds) while it cycles (without moving your eyes). After several iterations you'll start noticing that the empty outlines fill in with ghostly redish or bluish colors! These illusory colors are called "afterimages". Interestingly, the colors of the afterimages vary, which is puzzling because they come from the same original figure. Moreover, the shape of the outlines determines the filled-in color, which is complementary to the color of the same shape in the original figure.

[Darthwing Teorist]

Ghosts!

[qiphlow]

i dig optical illusions.

[Earth_Monkey]

what boat

[I-mon]

bill the colours i saw in the white outlines were just paler versions of the green-blue and red-pink of the combined figure, but reversed.

[nianfong]

i-mon, what's really cool is how the shapes were only for the inverted colors within each shape. the inverted colors for the 90-deg rotated shape did not appear until the outline appeared.

[Formosa Neijia]

i dig optical illusions.

I've had my thought on threads completely but....um...happily derailed by people's avatars. I just couldn't focus on anything else. The animal side is strong. Did anyone even notice I wrote anything here? Hard isn't it?

Dave C.

[meeks]

a-frickin-men qiphlow

[MikeC]

still can't see the boat...but I'm tryin.