you won't believe your eyes

As optical illusions go, this one is pretty good.



It certainly looks like alternating spirals of blue and green, on a background of alternating orange and magenta. If I told you there was no blue in the image at all, I'd forgive you if you questioned it. The reality is, the "blue" spirals are exactly the same shade of green as the green spirals. The magenta background fools the eyes into interpreting the green as blue.

I know you're skeptical. When I read it here, I didn't believe it either. Even after I read the explanation, I wasn't convinced they were the same color. Finally, after I downloaded the image and loaded it into the GIMP and verified that both spirals had an RGB value of 00ff96, I started looking for the man behind the curtain. I still didn't want to believe it.

If you've got a paint program with a color picker, and a few minutes to play around with it, you can download the image yourself to verify it. Or if you don't want to test it yourself, you'll have to decide whether you're going to believe me or your lying eyes.