AT FIRST glance, this photo looks like a normal coloured picture of a group of teenagers – but it is actually an optical illusion as it is black and white.
London-based digital artist Stuart Humphryes shared the picture on Twitter explaining how it demonstrates the “colour assimilation grid illusion.”
He simply added a grid featuring colourful lines over the black and white image.
Stuart explained how our brains “fill in the gap” of colour perception, and apply the grid colour to the whole of the image.
In the shot, the teenagers’ T-shirts appear green, blue, yellow or red, and the tree behind them appears green.
However, on closer inspection, you can see that the picture is actually greyscale without any colours on the garments or surrounding nature.
Stuart’s image has gone viral on Twitter, and many people said their minds were blown at the illusion.
Stuart explained: “This is fascinating and shows how weak colour information can be on a photo for the brain to fill in the gaps and ‘colourise’ it for you.
“It’s a black and white photo, but overlaid with a thin grid of coloured lines. They’re enough to trick your mind into seeing a full colour image.”
One baffled person responded: “It works for me completely. I am blown away. Nice test to start my day.”
Another added: “That’s extraordinary.”
Vision scientist Bart Anderson from the University of Sydney previously explained the phenomenon to Science Alert in 2019.
He said: “The colour system is what vision scientists refer to as ‘low pass’, i.e., many of the receptive fields that code colour are quite large.”
“So the grids get ‘averaged’ with the achromatic background, which then gets attributed to that part of the image.”
Previously, people can’t decide if this handbag is blue or green in tricky optical illusion – so what do YOU see?
And a mum shares photo of daughter sinking in concrete… So can YOU work out what’s really going on?