Comment by armchairhacker
1 year ago
This is really cool. Tangentially, it's an example of an important life lesson, "work smarter not harder". To see the impossible color, you could build a super-expensive, super-complicated laser to directly stimulate the exact cells; or you could desensitize the other ones with an optical illusion that works on a personal device (effectively zero cost and minimal complexity since it uses existing technology).
Not to say the laser is a waste, despite the above I'd argue it's very useful. It lets us test how effectively the above actually works, and has other applications.
This optical illusion isn't some brand new thing. It's been widely known since I was a child, and surely hundreds of years before that.
The laser system results in a stronger perceptual effect than you get from the illusion alone. We didn't have the technology to build it until recently. I'm certain the people who built it knew about the illusion, and it's probably what inspired the experiment in the first place.
That is a notion that is far easier to make in hindsight.