Neon Heart Optical Illusion

G. Sarcone really makes great optical illusions. If you don’t believe me, just check some of his stuff we featured earlier. Take his “Neon Heart illusion” for example – can you see the faint glow surrounding the heart? It might help if you squint your eyes a little. Well, I’m afraid the neon glow you perceived is just an illusion, and that the yellow unicolor background is same for each box in the grid. It’s just the part of the grid painted black that’s responsible for this. I think it has something to do with contrasts, but don’t take me for granted. BTW, the effect gets much stronger the more you shrink the image. If you wish, you can download our desktop widget (if you haven’t already) and see how it looks in the “Illusion of The Day” widget.

16 Replies to “Neon Heart Optical Illusion”

  1. ..forgot to mention – if you really concentrate on the middle of the picture above, you might even get the heart to completely disappear! Didn’t expect we had a double optical illusion in here. How about that!

  2. I had to squint a bit then I saw it. After that I couldn’t not see it. I could even see it from across a 15ft room.

  3. The easiest way to shrink the Image is using the control key and the – key. Do it 4-5 times and the heart image becomes much clearer.

  4. Interesting enough, if one does resample the image to a lower resolution, the yellow adjacent to the dark lines *does* actually get lighter.

    This may say something about the colorimetric mechanisms at work in addition to any behavior of the retina.

    [img]http://www.momijihouse.com/files/NHO_Resample.PNG[/img]

  5. The use of the color blue is common in optical illusions because our eyes can’t focus on it very well – thus the perception that the neighboring boxes have a slight bluish tint. We mostly focus on green and red content. Blue content tends to be out of focus when there are other colors nearby, and that’s why this illusion works so easily. That’s not to say it couldn’t be done with other color combinations, but with blue it’s more easily achieved.

  6. When I first read the post I thought it was going to be more neon, so I concentrated on not concentrating, then it disappeared, but now that I understand the effect I can’t make it disappear anymore. Cool illusion though – love your work Vurdlak!

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