[visionlist] is this visual illusion already existing?

[PERRINET Laurent]

Dear community,

As part of a collaboration with artist Etienne Rey from Marseille<https://ondesparalleles.org>, and fiddling with different ways to develop a controlled visual stimulus designed to show the perceptual asymmetry between foveal and peripheral vision, we ended up with an image which may be of interest for the vision community.

For a desktop computer (you may have to zoom and avoid luminous environments):

[2026-09-14-pale-blue-dots_big.jpg]

If on a phone (just cropping the above):

[GraphiqueCollé-1.png]


Basically, whenever your eye catches a shape in the image, you see it with a perceived luminance different from the background (this may take one second or two), and the background is perceived mostly uniformly. Changing the position of your fixation should « ignite » another shape. Should work for most eyes, at least it did in the crowd around me (except a fellow friend with poor color vision, sorry mate). As it moves the spatial zone of clarity under the gaze as a flashlight would do as you search your keys that dropped in the lawn at night, we called it the *flashlight illusion*, but maybe it already exists with a different name?

Here is my question to the community: As for many illusions, the chances are high that I reinvented the wheel (and warm water at the same time) and that it already exists. I searched extensively on the « visual illusion bible » (aka Michael Bach’s website), and looked to various parts of the interweb but nothing close and I hope someone would have a clue.

Cheers,
Laurent

PS: I try to document the development of the illusion in this Jupyter / Python notebook<https://laurentperrinet.github.io/sciblog/posts/2026-07-31-pale-blue-dots.html> - would be glad if you perceive the illusion better for other parameters (I looked at it certainly too much)
PS2: as a bonus, the shapes are either pentagons, hexagons or octagons - again you can spot that only under your point of fixation



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