When we covered this phenomenon in my psychology degree it was referred to as colour constancy. I now work as a 3D graphics programmer and so know a lot about the physics of light transport. The illusion does not surprise me any more, in fact it seems a little surprising that I ever could have thought that the RGB colour value of an onscreen pixel was directly related to the property of objects in the real world that we call ‘colour’.
When we covered this phenomenon in my psychology degree it was referred to as colour constancy. I now work as a 3D graphics programmer and so know a lot about the physics of light transport. The illusion does not surprise me any more, in fact it seems a little surprising that I ever could have thought that the RGB colour value of an onscreen pixel was directly related to the property of objects in the real world that we call ‘colour’.