The Cosmonauts: Background color optical illusion

Background color optical illusion

written by Javier on 8/10/2009

This video just sums up to my obsession about form, figure and background in interterface design. Check it out, it’s plain amazing:

8/10/2009Francisco says:

Great video.

In words of Tufte: “The smallest effective difference” or a psychophisiological effect. Colin Ware explains the principles of this type of perception in “Information Visualization” (perhaps, one of the best book about this theme).
9/10/2009César Astudillo says:

Our perception processes try to decode the light intensity of each region of our viewfield as the sum of two constituents: “luminance” (the intrinsic colour and brightness of the object) and “illumination” (the quality and distribution of light received by the object). Notice in the first frames of the video, when there is not any pencil yet, you may well perceive the blue sheet as a uniformly blue sheet that is slightly folded in four segments, where the shades of blue would be due to illumination differences. One can even “see” how the sheet might have been folded to create that effect. The presence of the pencil has two effects: first, it prevents us from seeing the boundary between shades, and second, it gives our brain a three-dimensional “hint” that the difference in shade might be due to the presence of the pencil. One way or the other, it’s our brains trying to interpret the resulting image as different combinations of “luminance” and “illumination”…
13/10/2009Variaciones de color says:

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