The human eye can’t distinguish individual images displayed in rapid succession, so screen manufacturers and old movie projectors take advantage of this in different ways to produce the illusion of continuous motion.īy looking through the microscope, you can see all three illusions in action. Moving images take advantage of another limitation of your visual perception.
Because of your eye’s inability to differentiate individual pixels and subpixels, the screen's light that shines onto your retina gets blended into an illusion of a single, clear picture. On modern mobile device display screens, pixels and subpixels are small and packed tightly together. These colored pixels are comprised of associated red, green, and blue subpixels. Pixels are the smallest visible color unit on a display screen. Our eyes have limited visual resolution, so we can only make out details to a certain degree. Computer and smartphone screens use red, green and blue subpixels (lights) set to varying intensities to create all the color combinations that we see. Each responds to wavelengths in a certain part of the spectrum, roughly corresponding to red, green, and blue light. Humans only have three types of color receptors on our retinas. Mobile device manufacturers take advantage of several visual processing tricks or optical illusions to display screen images:
