pixeloom

True Colours

Stare at a wall of websites in their opposite colours for twenty seconds, then watch their own colours appear on a grey one.

Pixeloom Original · Colour

How to play

Keep your eyes on the cross

For twenty seconds, look only at the small cross in the middle of this strange wall. Try not to move your eyes. Then the wall turns grey.

  • Under a minute · one question · then the explanation
How it works — best read after you have tried it

The colours were in your eyes

While you held still, the parts of your eye that sense each colour tired where that colour fell on them. When the wall turned grey, the tired ones answered less than the rest, and for a few seconds grey looked like the opposite of what had tired them.

The wall you stared at was the opposite of the real one: every tile drawn in its inverse. So the opposite of the opposite is what appeared on the grey — each site’s tile in something close to its own colour, and the lighter and darker tiles too, which is why the faint shape they draw can show for a moment before it fades.

Woven from 27 sites

Every tile is a site listed on Pixeloom. Nobody paid for a place in this picture; each site gets the same number of tiles.

Show all 27

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