FIRST ‘that dress’ divided the internet when people argued over its actual colour – and now a plate of strawberries is causing mass confusion.
An image shared to Twitter shows what appears to be a selection of red strawberries on a tart filtered with a blue hue, but all is not as it seems.
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This image of a tart and strawberries has a blue hue over it, with the creator claiming there is no red in the image at all – but can you still see it?Credit: twitter/AkiyoshiKitaoka
In actual fact, there is not a single red pixel in the image.
The confusing illusion was uploaded by Japanese Professor of Psychology, Akiyoshi Kitaoka, who specialises in creating optical illusions and regularly uploads them on Twitter.
Akiyoshi explained: “Illusion of strawberry by the two-color method. Although this image are [sic] all made of the pixels of the cyan (blue-green), strawberries appear red.
“Strawberries appear to be reddish, though the pixels are not.”
So why can we can see red?
Unlike the dress image, everyone is seeing the same thing this time, but the illusion is created through a phenomenon called colour constancy.
Bevil Conway, an expert on visual perception from the National Eye Institute, explained that your brain simply “colour corrects” when visuals are processed in a different light.
Bevil said to Motherboard: “If you imagine walking around outside under a blue sky, that blueness is, in some sense, color-contaminating everything you see.
“If you take a red apple outside under a blue sky, there are more blue wavelengths entering your eye.
“If you take the apple inside under a fluorescent or incandescent light without that same bias, the pigments in the apple are exactly the same but because the spectral content of the light source is different, the spectrum entering your eye that’s reflected off the object is different.”
Many Twitter users have debated about the actual colours of the strawberries, with some isolating the fruit and putting it on a white background.
They claim only blue and grey colours are seen when this happens.
It is not the first time an optical illusion has left internet users scratching their heads.
First that gold or blue dress sparked debate and last week a photo of a gym goer’s backwards feet had the internet baffled.
People have also been trying to spot a hidden baby concealed in an image of a couple staring across a lake.
Categories: Optical Illusion
Source: HIS Education