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by plg 2161 days ago
WOW there is a strange visual illusion for me, the red fonts seem to be sitting 3D <behind> the rest of the page
3 comments

Do you wear glasses? You could be seeing the effects of chromatic abberation.

I have fairly thick and high-refractive-index glasses and can regularly experience this phenomenon where different-colored text shifts in different directions, creating a "3D" effect. The Microsoft logo is a great example of this: if I tilt my head up the red/orange and blue squares seem to move toward each other, and the yellow and green ones away from each other, and vice versa if I tilt my head down.

Two possibilities come to mind. The red channel in each pixel might be at the left, causing all the pure red text to be slightly shifted relative to the other text.

Another might be chromatic aberration if you wear glasses. (This causes the Windows logo to look comically maligned for me.) Whether it's behind or in front of the text would depend on the tilt of your head.

Wow I posted at basically the same time, and also mentioned the Microsoft logo. It's just a perfect test case to see this kind of thing happening, I guess.
My hunch is that this could be the result of subpixel antialiasing. It often creates a sort of fringing around the text, which ideally isn't very apparent... but it takes advantage of separate RGB components. Red text has only one component, so the fringing may have the effect of darkening on one side, and brightening on the other, which can look a little like 3d relief.