Remember THE dress?…we’re about to go down that rabbit hole again thanks to this optical illusion from Facebook’s chief scientist Michael Abrash.
Speaking at last week’s F8 conference, Michael used the above image to show that we are “inference machines” living in an illusion.
In relation to the picture above, Michael asked the conference attendees which pill they would choose. The left pill looks blue grey at first glance while the right pill has a tinge of red.
The reality is that both pills are grey, as demonstrated by the below image.
Michael’s reasoning for the blue and red appearance of the bills is relatively easy to comprehend.
He says that we see different hues depending on the background colour of the image and that blind spots can interfere with how we see different colours.
Michael said: “Our visual data is actually astonishingly sparse and even if we were able to accurately record and process every photon that reaches our eyes, we’d still have too little data to be able to reconstruct the world accurately.
“Our visual system takes its best guess and sends that to the conscious mind”.
Mind blown? Yep, us too.
