Benham's artificial spectrum top

11mo ago
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Description

Here I demonstrate Benham's artificial spectrum top (from Nature, 51:113-114, 1894), which gives the viewer the illusion of seeing color from moving black and white hues. Catering to the lazy scientist, this Benham's top spins with a push of a button. The button is just a force sensing resistor (FSR), which goes through the Arduino to turn on a small DC motor that rotates a disk with black and white patterns on it. This illusion of color from moving black and white hues is referred to as pattern-induced flicker colors or Fechnel colors. They are subjectively perceived. They are thought to arise from network interactions betweenthe three different types of color-perceiving sensors in the retina, namely the red, green, and blue cones, which have different time latencies in detecting light.