Spanish Castle Magic
This little illusion brought me a lot of traffic from Spain for some reason. Thanks guys! Here's a special one just for you. See if you can guess where the photo is from.
Stare at the black dot in the center of this image for 30 seconds.
Then, without moving your eyes, move your mouse over the image.
The image looks like it's in color until you move your eyes.
(by the way, it's a photo of this)
UPDATE: If you subscribe to my RSS feed you may have noticed that I went a little overboard and originally had a huge image for this post. You can go see that one here if you're so inclined!
UPDATE II: The tutorial is up. Go forth and make thine own illusions.
The image looks like it's in color until you move your eyes.
(by the way, it's a photo of this)
UPDATE: If you subscribe to my RSS feed you may have noticed that I went a little overboard and originally had a huge image for this post. You can go see that one here if you're so inclined!
UPDATE II: The tutorial is up. Go forth and make thine own illusions.
posted by John Sadowski at Monday, June 05, 2006
135 Comments:
Hey, that was a really stunning illusion! Greets from Spain :-)
The reason of your spanish traffic is simple:
www.microsiervos.com
(they served 2 million pages last month...)
I made a papercraft of that castle when I was 13. I still have it, everybody wants to see it on the trash, but I always manage to save it.
Congratulations :-D
And also linked from http://www.meneame.net
15800993 (1.5M) pages served last month
nice works john, and thanks for the spanish castle. I have a house near that castle :-)
your illusions are well known in the spanish blogosphere , as someone has said, microsiervos.com has the fault xD.
Fabuloso, me ha encantado.
Awesome. I love it.
Awesome! (flipante!)
Sí, yo también vengo por Microsiervos
Beautiful illusion :) Thanks from Spain ^^
Well donde dude ;) ( also here from Microsiervos )
Desde micro... muy bueno.
From Spain and Microsiervos too...
This just kicks ass. (and lil' color does, too ;) )
Howd'ya do it???
Asombroso! saludetes desde Ecuador (Suramérica), sí también redirigido desde microsiervos.
Buenas!!! desde españa, yo llegué a través de www.yonkis.com
Saludos
I too would love to know how that's done. I assume it's a colour transformation that would be next to trivial to apply in photoshop/gimp/whatever, but what's the transformation?
That is the coolest thing I have 'seen' all year.
Thank you
snowflake, this is what I read somewhere, tested and it seemed to work pretty well for the image I tried:
Convert the image to LAB color, fill the L channel with 50% gray and invert the A and B channels.
Thanks canadademon, I think I got the bandwidth problem ironed out for now!
Everybody else who is asking me how I did it, stay tuned, I'll be posting a tutorial pretty soon...
~js
The illusion didn't work for me the first time. Then I realized my Javascript blocker ("NoScript" on Firefox) was blocking the changing of the image when I moved my mouse over it. You might want to mention in your instructions that Javascript needs to be enabled.
Cool effect.
--
Kent
I thought this was going to be one of those scary things... Nice!
www.HellraiserPuzzleBox.com
amazing!!! a wonderful effect.
Greetings form spain :)
uh oh... this got dugg.
holy shit
The large version is incredible.
What's the illusion? It just made me feel a little stupid for sitting there for half a minute. :D
Neat. But why does this happen? Is it somekind of a mixup in the "update vision" function of the brain??
That's friggin AWESOME !! how does that work???
Andrew, NYC , US
Here's a twist:
I'm slightly colorblind, greens and reds, can't pick strawberries etc.
When I do the excercise, I can see a clearblue sky - but the rest is still in black and white!
Anyone else out there? (at least 12% of the guys but only 0.1% of the girls)
Nellie
Wow worked for me and I am (very)colour blind.
But only the first time?
すげーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーー！
Here's how it works, basically, the first image is the negative of the the real image, it's all opposite. When you stare at the bright screen with this image for so long, your eyes literally get tired, and so all the receptors that pick up the blues and oranges get tired, and just don't see anymore for a little while. When you go over it and it goes black and white, well, white light is really just the entire spectrum, it's every single color coming at you all at once. But your eyes are tired of the blues and oranges, so it doesn't see them! You're now left with the colors in white light that your eyes "want" to pick up - the real colors of the picture that weren't desensitized.
nope, it's not a negative. only the colors (more precisely the hues) are opposite, but the brightness is constant over the entire image. (this is a bit complicated to confirm with a standard RGB image, since standard RGB space does not accurately describe the way in which we perceive colors, so please just trust me there, or if you know how to "desaturate" in photoshop, just convert the image to "Lab Mode" first.)
basically, the rods on your retina are all stimulated by the same brightness and thus primed for accurately perceiving the following b/w image. at the same time, the cone cells are primed in another way, they are biased so as to interpret the following color information ("grey", i.e. "no color") differently in different areas of the retina. how this biasing works is explained wonderfully in the previous comment, but the explanation basically only applies to the cones, i.e. the 'color sensors'.
i think it's important to point this out, because it's the reason why the illusion works so well. some of the imitations of this illusion that cropped up recently do indeed first show a negative image, and the result ends up looking crappy. boo! hiss! the copycats who want to duplicate the effect without even knowing what's going on are dimwits, punish them with disregard!
I put up a tutorial on how to make this illusion with your own photos.
Thanks for all the great comments everybody!
js
hi from Strasbourg (France) : amazing ,congratulations for this very good job!!Welldone
You've been linked from Antiwikipedia!
Very cool illusion!
What a way to start the day out in Hawai'i. It goes to say, one
should never say they have seen
everything. Mahalo nui loa, (thank you very much)Aloha, Ralph.
No one else has mentioned it, but I can "bring the color back". After looking away, if I focus back on the dot, the color comes back, but only at about half the brightness as the original effect. Two times I was able to flick my eyes quickly back to the dot and get the full color image back, but only for a split second.
hey, it's Elham from Iran...
it's awesome...
flippin sweet
u dont have to focus on the dot, just move your mouse and u can see the difference.....
its amazin ! ! !
Very neat how you did that! The mind is an amazing thing.
I'm bumfuzzled! very cool.
-sinergenesis
en xal apan
argumenta:
¿kinergenesis?;
¿mimetastasis ;
¡muysuigeneris!
¡Está camaleón!
gracias por el mitour.
OH MY GOD!
This is fun!
MY EYES!!!!!!!!!!!
nice
ekik, vre goe vent!!
жава-скрипт наёбка!
It AMAZED me ! Wonderful !
Ebuamsworld stole your content?
NO WAI!
great illution! love it :P greetings from norway!
This is a FAKE! Without staring at the picture, the image will also change when you move the mouse over the picture.
Yes, anonymous, that's what happens when you mouseover. But the image won't be in color.
Basically you stare at the picture for 30 secs. Once ou do, you see it in color. If you look away even an inch it'll be black/white. If you look back at it it'll be color (but eventually fade).
It's all in your eyes. But if you mouseover it without staring, it's just b/w. Silly.
its not fake, its a negative of what the colors should be in a normal pic, so when you stare at it for a long time you get an imprint of the negative at what your looking at, so when you apply it to the black and white pic, you see it in the normal color. idk its hard to explain.
Hello!!
i do not understand this whole castly shibang! it confuses me n ma dearest Ailsa hu isnt the brightest of sparks!!! U burn my eyes with ur castle n Spain!!
fairwell amigo... xXmwahXx
That was so awesome I had never seen anything like that
Neat-o
Outstanding Illusion
awesome......
found the link on http://www.wer-weiss-was.de/content/start.shtml
greeets from germany
lil
That's cool!
Some people didn't realise the mouse is supposed to be OFF the image to start with. Then sit there waiting for something to happen...and nothing does :-)
Brilliant, saw this on digg :D
do you understand how trippy this shit is when stoned??? THAT FREAKED ME OUT!!!
Why it works:
http://www.psychologie.tu-dresden.de/i1/kaw/diverses%20Material/www.illusionworks.com/html/color_aftereffect.html
very cool
Stunning illusion.....
Very cool well done
it did not work for me. How come I saw no color at all? (No, I am not colorblind :) )
Dz, try the big castle. It has more area that you'll know are color. Sky. Grass. The problem with this smaller image for you may be that the caslte itself it pretty gray. http://www.johnsadowski.com/big_spanish_castle.html
John, I also put the original on stumpleupon.com so that may be some of your traffic.
Sorry, that should have been http://www.stumbleupon.com/
Yeah, I have been getting a lot of traffic from stumbleupon. Thanks Anonymous!
Very nice, seen many optical "jokes", but never seen this one!
greets from holland.
Very nice castle image! I stared at the center dot and moved the mouse and yip--the pic changed color alright!! Nice trick!!
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
Ниче не вижу!
I can't see anything!
Is this symmetrical? In the sense that if we look at the original color image, and then switch to b/w then we would see the "special" image of the castle?
Mario
It's amazing piece of hard work.
Suberb Work.
From:Nikhil
You only have to look for 15 seconds. Unless that's just me
Wow!!! I totally love this optical illusion. I was so surprised! That's an amazing discovery... They should make a website full of these; I would visit it every day... :D
Anthony you should realiser that you are one of "They".
Anyone who took psychology in high school or college shouldnt be surprised by this.
i thought it was pretty damn cool as cool things go.
So freaking amazing!
that is a stupid illusion because when ever u put ur mouse on it it changes colors so I know ur little trick hahahahahaha
Dang that's cool. Great job!
Greetings from Egypt :) Thnaks
it also works if you just look at the the dot from the begining and hold the mouse over
This is a great demonstration of the after-image effect in our vision. The castle is a color negative. When we change to view the grayscale image, we see the castle's after-image, which is a color positive. The grayscale creates no after-image and so does not compete with or override the effect.
Totally amazing, man.
This is AMAZING STUFF! MY GOD!!! whoa
freaky weird odd neat!
I dont get it. I get alot of things but not this.
The sky turns blue, thats amazing.
Linda imagen y gracias por esa image.
beautiful image and thank you for that image.
Belle image et merci beaucoup pour cet image
amazing, truley amazing
Are you from Gainesville FL??
You really only have to look at it for 5 seconds, but the longer you look, the better the effect.
awsome, it fades from colored to the black and white haha sooo gotta share this
awsome, it fades from colored to the black and white haha sooo gotta share this
Great stuff!
I love optical illusions. I re-create Rubin's Vase with people's actual profiles. Check it out
www.portraitpedestal.com
THATS AWESOME MATE ps gday from australia!!! yeah see ya in tha outback old bud lovin this life!
Nice! ^_^
Really great illusion :) !
VERY CLEVER NEVER WOULD HAVE GEUSSED IT (SARCASM)
U R SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL
^_^ ^_^ ^_^ ^_^ ^_^ ^_^
greatttttt
thanks
It's too bad it doesn't work if your color blind like me. I'd love to see it!!
that was pretty dumb, I thought something real would happen-I looked at the dot..went back up to the directions..moved my mouse and it turned into color automaticly... so the picture just changes when u put ur mouse over it.... lame.
bullshit
what a waste of 1 min of important lifetime!!!
".moved my mouse and it turned into color automaticly... so the picture just changes when u put ur mouse over it.... lame."
Uhh the 'image mouse over' isn't the effect (it's not supposed to be some complicated JavaScript): if you doubt the effect why not fire up your favourite art program and then note that the picture that you see when moused over is indeed B&W inspite of the insistence of your mind that it is in colour.
This is the entire point of the illusion - you mind has created the colour information from the luminance image and the chrominance image.
that was pretty cool!!!! (kingpinga)
This is one of the coolest after sight illusions ever! It rocks!
I understand how this sort of illusion works, but that didn't stop me from being totally amazed by what you have created. I can't wait to share it with my young students who are learning about optical illusions! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
Thanks, Anonymous. I was pretty surprised by how strong the effect is, also. I hope your students enjoy it. I think it will be very cool if one day one of my kids' teachers show their class this illusion — then they can brag that their dad created it :D
hahahahahahahaha.......... nice GIF image
the cooliest optical illusion i've ever seen!!:D
send link to all you're friends!!
Does not work for me :)
That was the most interesting optical illusion I've ever seen. Thanks (from Austin, Texas).
Thank you. This made my day, maybe relieved some stress from work and study. Very cute. Direct. Love it. Thank you.
This is a great illusion - obviously, it's still getting the e-mail FWDs after a few years. Thanks for sharing this :)
Hey really cool illusion my father was amazed!
Lillith, 38
As of right now, nothing happens when the user mouses over in Firefox 3. The other color illusion works.
what crap is this....pls dont fool people...!!!
This illusion is pretty amazing. I'd say it in the top 5 that I've ever saw.
i love this
at first i was skeptical but it actually works
It's very far away
It takes about a half a day to get there
If we travel by
Dragonfly
nice
Crazy how our eyes work
Veryy nice
At first I thought you tricked us and when I moved the mouse and saw the picture change I laughed, I didn't expect a new picture to come up, and I thought, oh I could have just moved the mouse without waiting 30 seconds, but now I understand, I think it is cool!
Hey that was an awesome optical illusion!!
I am a green colorblind and a female which makes me on in a million. I have never gotten any of these things to work, nor have I ever really understood black light pictures because I see the brightness but not any color. I SAW the difference in this. Not a miracle but it isn't some picture you pick up at a novelty shop either. I enjoyed this!! I was pretty excited that I saw it.
omg noobs, you dont have to watch the dot for thirty seconds it already is in color when you move your mouse over it... damn
This has got to be the most trippy optical illusion ever. When I put my mouse over it, it shocked me, as it was suddenly in colour, I jumped and then it went to black and white straight after. That shocked me just as much XD. All in all I was rather amused
This is the craziest thing I've ever seen!!!!!!
Well... almost, hehe ;D
Persistence of Vision, cool ;0
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