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Comment by chadcmulligan | Hacker News Reader

Red and blue are the extremes of colours we can see, and because of the change in wave length they focus at different lengths in our eye. So to focus on either colour your eye has to adjust its focal length, which gives the 3d effect. The perspective probably adds to it.

It's called chromostereopsis - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromostereopsis

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The strongest example I've found of Chromostereopsis that I've found:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CeaBIWdWEAAmm4_.jpg

I have another example in my design inspiration notes that is based on a live action image: https://i.imgur.com/Tau4fHc.jpg

Came here to say this, and also that I like this other page with a good explanation of the phenomenon.

http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/scolor-e.html

That first image is incredible. The effect is so strong.

I'm jelous :[ Being stereoblind none of the examples work for me.

The effect is still visible when viewing them with one eye.

Akiyoshi Kitaoka is and has been the king of optical illusions for as long as I can remember. My undergraduate thesis in 2005 was based on his work [0], and even at that time he had a huge body of work.

[0] I demonstrated exploiting various optical illusions to create depth and animation effects. I thought I was going to revolutionize game graphics on mobile devices! And then mobile devices got GPUs shortly thereafter.

Why doesn’t it work as well on a mobile phone though? Especially since an iPhone has better color reproduction than most desktop monitors.

I think it may also depend on the subpixel geometry[0][1] (and pixel density) of the screen. There are a lot of ways to arrange subpixels.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_geometry

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenTile_matrix_family

Here's the iPhone 13: https://www.displaymate.com/Diamond_69M.html

This hurt my eyes more than any image I've ever looked at -- desktop monitor. Ow.

Worked for me on my iPhone 6s+, though not as strong as OP described. Maybe LCD vs OLED?

Is it because you're viewing it at a different distance (phone usually closer than monitor) and therefore the focusing variation is different?

In other words. The brain has a bug on the chromatic aberration part of the image processing pipeline.

Who wear glasses, either in the face or in a camera, may have noticed, a red or blue contour on some occasions. This also happens with our eyes, but it seems the brain use this to infer depth.

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