Archive for optical illusion

Nine Purple Dots

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , on June 8, 2026 by telescoper

I posted this little optical illusion yesterday on BlueSky and it proved so popular I thought I’d repeat it here.Whichever of the purple dots you look directly at turns more purple:

I find the effect is stronger on a smaller screen (e.g. on a phone).

In a nutshell, this happens because your eyes have reduced sensitivity to blue light at the centre of your field of view so the purple (which is a mixture of red and blue) changes hue if you look directly at it. For more details see here and the following blog post:

I’m interested to know whether or not this works for people who are colour blind, so if that is you please let me know!

Optical Illusion

Posted in Art with tags , on January 26, 2023 by telescoper

It’s not an illusion that I didn’t post yesterday. I have been very busy this week and didn’t have time to put anything on the blog. To get things going again, here is an intriguing optical illusion I saw on Twitter.

The point is that the cubes are not moving at all:

This is not an Animation…

Posted in Art with tags , on April 8, 2019 by telescoper

To find out more about this optical illusion, which was created by Yurii Peripedia using nothing more complicated than Adobe Illustrator, see here.