Advertisements Whatever you guessed was probably wrong. Unless you said one.
This one sphere has the exact RGB values of (255,188,144), and it is kind of goldish-bronze. Here all the spheres look bronze. Now, go back to the top photos and look at the spheres again. Only this time focus on a single sphere. It looks bronze as well. Focus on a different sphere… Bronze again… It is only when you look at the entire photo, the spheres assume different colors. Here is that same photo with no stripes going over the spheres.
Still not buying it? Look at this animated gif by syfy.com:
So why is this happening? Why do we see the color of the spheres change even though we know that they are all in the same color? Syfy explains: Perhaps the most mesmerizing illustration of this illusion is this video by thehardmenpath: This is called the Munker-White illusion (or sometimes just the Munker illusion), and it’s a powerful one. When you’re not looking directly at the balls, the color of the stripes pulls the color of the ball toward it, in a manner of speaking, so the green stripes make the ball look greener.
If you want more here are some more illusions by Prof. David Novick: [Prof. David Novick The University of Texas at El Paso via Bad Astronomy]
