yes, they really are frightening. i saw them (whilst attached to charlie) at reading festival last year. the crowd had come fully prepared with bottles of apple juice (i'm SURE that it was apple juice) to bottle them all off stage. however, they were good enough to win over the crowd (not an easy feat with a crowd of peeved indie fopsters) and win the day, not to mention maintain their dignity.
(although whether you actually have any dignity left to maintain after being in busted is a whole different issue...)
Seem to be that the image changes to a coloured one whenever you point your mouse over it, no matter where or what you have or haven't been staring at... that's no optical illusion.
(or is that the point and I'm being too literal again today?)
The normal image is some wacky inverted (it isn't inverted in the classical RGB sense) image, the mouse-over image is greyscale.
The illusion is that the human brain(/eye) is fooled into believing that it knows what colours should be there, but is currently not receiving that information (much like the way that most of what we 'see' is actually mono-chromatic, but the 'colour' is added by the brain/eye).
Indeed, they're not "inverted", but swapped with their complimentary colours. Staqring at the image for a while brings the brain to compensate for the colour saturation and in so doign corrects the greyscale image into the full colour one you see in the end.
You can see the process undo itself somewhat too, if you look slightly off centre briefly and then back after you switch to greyscale you will see the colours still, but with much lower saturation as your brain readjusts to the real image.
blah
But what's with the scary icon ?!?
(thought it was buzzed)
Charley's eyebrows are still terrifying.
(although whether you actually have any dignity left to maintain after being in busted is a whole different issue...)
Indeed, he does seem to have pulled off the impossible by producing a real music career from his time in a boyband. Whodathunkit.
(or is that the point and I'm being too literal again today?)
The illusion is that the human brain(/eye) is fooled into believing that it knows what colours should be there, but is currently not receiving that information (much like the way that most of what we 'see' is actually mono-chromatic, but the 'colour' is added by the brain/eye).
The original images are located here:
"Normal": http://www.johnsadowski.com/2006_stuffs/manzana1.jpg
"Mouse-over": http://www.johnsadowski.com/2006_stuffs/manzana2.jpg
You can see the process undo itself somewhat too, if you look slightly off centre briefly and then back after you switch to greyscale you will see the colours still, but with much lower saturation as your brain readjusts to the real image.