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Comment by ConcernedCoder | Hacker News Reader

The photos look exactly as I'd imagine they should, i.e. if the grid is providing 20% of the color of the original, the result looks 20% as colorful... I'm not sure I get what's "magical" about this?

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Well why don't we see a B&W image with coloured lines on it? Rather we see a coloured image with coloured lines on it. It's pretty spooky to me.

It's interesting zooming in, until the point that your brains perceives the grid properly, and a B&W image pops forth.

Why, because we're myopic, so our eyes run "blur interpolate" on the image... or do those also work for people with 20/20 eye sight?

Hm, not sure. We can easily resolve the structural detail within each grid, so does our brain just interpolate for colour? I wonder would a green grid on the sky make us perceive a green sky, or do we interpolate it here because we know the sky should be blue.

If I zoom into the point where I can clearly see the grid pixels, the grayscale areas in between the grid lines still have an illusion of color for me. I think the examples images have too fine of a grid that makes the illusion seem unimpressive and trivial. But if you open them in an image editor (or just use your browser's magnify feature) and zoom in, there's a point where things change from being just a blurry color image to a surprising illusion.

This effect works because the human visual system naturally acquires color information at lower resolution than black and white information.

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