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What do you see? Why this optical illusion photo has gone viral

A seemingly simple photo has sent the internet into frenzy, as the picture isn’t what it seems.

The picture of school girls, posing with a tortoise was originally taken by Chuwa Francis and was later given a ‘colour illusion remix’.

The photo has since done the rounds on social media.

“What you ‘see’ is what your [brain] predicts the reality to be, given the imperfect information it gets,” Tweeted Lionel Page.

In the photo, the girls all appear to be wearing different coloured shirts - red, blue, yellow and green, however the image is actually black and white.

The illusion is all thanks to Øyvind Kolås, who describes himself as a ‘digital media toolsmith’ on his Patreon illustration tool account.

In the picture, the ‘colour’ is actually just a series of saturated lines, forming a grid. The trick is, our brain automatically fills in the squares, giving the illusion of a solid colour.

Before the photo of the schoolgirls went viral, Kolås posted a similar picture to his Patreon.

The black and white photo of students is covered in coloured lines makes an optical illusion which has got people talking on social media.
The brain basically fills in the gaps, tricking you into thinking there's a solid colour in the photo, when in fact there's only grid lines. Source: Øyvind Kolås Patreon.

“The image for the post is a visual/artistic experiment playing with simultaneous contrast resulting from other experiments these days,” the post says.

“An over-saturated coloured grid over-laid on a grayscale image causes the grayscale cells to be perceived as having colour.”

While many complained about the quality of the image in Mr Page’s Tweet, links to a better quality image can be found on Kolås’s Patreon.

Regardless of image quality, the Tweet that kickstarted the chatter has been retweeted over 13,000 times and has amassed almost 30,000 likes.

The same technique and software has been used to trick people with other photos since Kolås posted the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) code to his Patreon.

Similar to other viral photos, namely the infamous white and gold, or black and blue dress, people have seen different things while looking at the picture.

Some people said they saw colour in the shifts, but the skin tones were still grey, others said they saw one colour more clearly than others.

Some said they simply saw a black and white image with different coloured lines drawn across the photo.

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