by We’re fascinated with optical illusions here at Creative Bloq, and just when we think we’ve been fooled in every possible way, another one comes along. We’ve already seen plenty of optical illusions that test how we perceive color, but here’s one that claims to generate a whole new color while we’re looking at the screen.
Stare long enough and you should be able to see a shade of orange that isn’t there and that, according to the illusion creator, can’t actually be displayed on a screen. Confused? I certainly am. This could be one of our selection of must-see optical illusions and the best optical illusions of the year.
@beatonthebeeb (opens in a new tab)
♬ original sound – Dean Jackson (opens in a new tab)
Dean Jackson aka @beatonthebeeb often leaves us baffled with his optical illusions on TikTok (opens in a new tab). In the video above, he begins by introducing the deep orange color. He says it’s the most intense shade of orange that can be displayed on a screen, but it’s possible to trick our brains into seeing an even more intense shade of orange that “doesn’t really exist.”
To see this ghost color, it tells us to look at a cross in the center of a cyan circle for 20 seconds without blinking or moving the screen. After a while, a halo of a deeper orange (‘hyper orange’ as Jackson calls it) should start to appear as a halo around the circle. It’s not really there; your brain is hallucinating that color,” he says.
But the optical illusion goes further. Jackson then removes the circle, giving us “a burst of hyper orange” where the cyan circle was before. How does this arcane sorcery work? Jackson says that cyan fatigues the receptors in the eyes that would normally fire and “contaminate the intensity of the orange.”
All I can say is that it works. One person commented on the video: “I now have an orange circle in front of my eyes everywhere I look. Send help!” “It’s like a sun, it’s so beautiful,” someone else writes. “Color theory is so fucking fun,” someone else concludes. To learn more about that, check out our ultimate guide to color theory, and if you want to create your own illusions, check out our pick of the best graphic design software for tools, or check out Adobe’s current Creative Cloud pricing below. .
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