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Dear community,
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<div>As part of a collaboration with artist <a href="https://ondesparalleles.org">Etienne Rey from Marseille</a>, 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. </div>
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<div>For a desktop computer (you may have to zoom and avoid luminous environments):</div>
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<div><img src="cid:B16D4E89-05BC-4D29-9179-25E2EB477A99" alt="2026-09-14-pale-blue-dots_big.jpg"></div>
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<div>If on a phone (just cropping the above):</div>
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<div><img width="585" alt="GraphiqueCollé-1.png" src="cid:626CF01F-94A7-4F26-89C2-9ED7B650B881"></div>
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<div>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?</div>
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<div><b>Here is my question to the community: </b><b>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.</b></div>
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<div>Cheers,</div>
<div>Laurent</div>
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<div>PS: I try to document the development of the illusion in this <a href="https://laurentperrinet.github.io/sciblog/posts/2026-07-31-pale-blue-dots.html">Jupyter / Python notebook</a> - would be glad if you perceive the illusion better for other parameters
(I looked at it certainly too much)</div>
<div>PS2: as a bonus, the shapes are either pentagons, hexagons or octagons - again you can spot that only under your point of fixation</div>
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