Going Viral: Blue&Black or Gold&White or Something else (0_o)
This is going viral...
What is the color of this dress? (read the comments attached to the following picture)
Is it white&Gold or Blue&Black or something else.
Here’s the dress photo with inverted colors
People all around the internet are engaging in debates: "What is the color of that freaking dress." They are trying to reason why to some people it appears one thing and to some others entirely different thing . There are a few who have seen both pair of the color. I am sharing these links. Go to them. Read the comments.
Please visit he following:
Is it real or some kind of trick or hoax ?
Guys you really don't want to miss it. Even "Adobe" got involved and shared its opinion.
Update!
Finally found out a convincing explanation. May be the Solution?
Note by
Soumo Mukherjee
6 years, 3 months ago
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This has nothing to do with screen position, contrast, reflection, daylight time, angling, or brightness. It's all with the eye.
I was convinced of this when me and my classmate observed the same picture of the dress and we both claimed opposing points. I made another observation; as we scrolled down the article and scrolled back up, our views of the dress flipped.
In other words, I suspect it has to do with pre-perceptory stimuli that trigger the brain to interpret the colors differently. Indeed, the shading formed a rare and somewhat intricate combination of all of the claimed colors, so that when one looks at it a certain way, it produces a very specific set of colors (BB & GW).
See WIRED
But seriously. US. Really? The Department of Homeland Security is about to shut down and THIS is what the people are debating over? No wonder we are in toil.
Though ironically this could be a perfect representation of US Congress: each side argues against the other, with full faith in its own rightness and full rejection of differing arguments.
Cheers, @Math Philic
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.... fiddling away while Rome burns .... :P I have learned a few things as a result of this "controversy", but it's good of you to remind us of more important crises afoot. Hope you're doing well, John, and not feeling too overwhelmed by all your AP courses.
Cheers man. Nice come back :D.
Haha. I Liked the US Congress one :D
I'm actually wondering what this is! I have no idea where the illussion is or why this is interesting...
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Yes am trying to figure out. And I am making progress. :D See my comment to Mr. Charlesworth. Now it's Blue&Black to me. But in the beginning it was White&Gold.
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Hey, I just see a different color now. Wow!
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What color are you seeing now ?
What is more interesting is more than 6,000 people getting mad at each other. ;)
I'm confused; it seems to be unequivocally white and gold.
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same it doesn't changes color literally as all others are arguing
Yeah. Me too.
Did you go through the comments. I am browsing comments right now. Really there are people seeing blue&black. Is it due to color blindness. See the comments
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My computer didn't seem to like that link, so I wasn't able to see the comments. However, there is blue-yellow color blindness, but not black-yellow or black-white, so I don't think that this is due to color blindness. I could imagine that some with color blindness would see a blue and white dress, but not blue and black; that just seems like a hoax to me.
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Its just an illusion...
And this. This one is from Twitter.
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I'd just like to see it in person, with someone in it and in natural lighting. Then I'll decide. :P
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Haha. Lol
That's the best.
@brian charlesworth . I tried adjusting my brightness and all. But still it appears to me as lightBlue&Gold. But I have been into this for quite a time.
However, if we zoom at the lower portion of the dress. So that the light from the background is cut off and we see only and only the lower portion of the dress. And adjust the brightness. We see blue and black. I did. But then if we do the same with the upper portion of the dress,it appears gold and white (or light blue).
Different people will have different brightness, contrast and color ratio in their respective monitors. The monitors themselves can be different. Some use LCD some CRT some LED. And while looking at the picture, different people will focus at different area. Some at the left, some at the right, or center, or bottom. They may after that try to grasp the whole picture. But the first attention point could be a specific part of the picture. A few people said, "When I scrolled up... I saw it was Blue&Black." This time they were viewing the lower portion first than the upper portion unlike when they first saw it . May be this is what causing the whole confusion?
Update. The roots :D
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O.k., that makes sense, then. I think it's more about contrast and brightness settings than anything else. I wonder if the business that makes this dress created this "controversy" as a creative way of advertising. :)
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Haha. Good point.
Even if it hasn't, many businesses would like to try it. "Buy the dress that made the internet insane."
:D
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Here is a good site with some similar, and some not so similar, illusions. I particularly like the one with the pink "circle" that turns green after a few seconds. :)
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Thanks. Wonderful site. It all ends finally :D The circle turning green is like magic. Human perception isn't so perfect. I also like the one which (a dice like object) appears of the same color after we place a finger at the middle.
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Yes, that one is fascinating too. After all of this, I have an even greater appreciation for the complexity of the human visual system.
Adobe says it's Blue&Black. My head is spinning now.
It's just the choice of viewing i.e. the difference in perspective that's the culprit .
Try for yourself , if you are viewing this on a laptop , push the screen as far away from you as possible and if you watch the picture now , you'll see it as blue .
If you see the pic by bringing the screen closer to you and watch it , it'll appear as gold .
P.S. My internet is slow , but I am trying to upload the pics about which I have talked about it above.
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I'm not getting that effect on my desktop computer, no matter how far away I am and regardless of the angle.
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Yup. I tried adjusting brightness as well. Nothing works.
But it's Blue&Gold to me right now. :(
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Here are the pics :
Is there any other way to upload a picture other than using the upload a picture tab provided by Brilliant ?
If there is , please enlighten me on it
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Yes there is. You need to upload the image on other image hosting sites like this. Then use
! [] ()
to share the image here.
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Ok I'll try using this :)
The inverted-color image of the real image. Can it help. The blue ( or white) becomes golden and the golden area become blue (or white) in the inverted-color image. Also see this. Same design with different color. From here
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I admit defeat , I am not able to upload the pics , sorry :(
Yes please. The world is getting crazy for this.
Save the world @Azhaghu Roopesh M . Come on !
Look up Incredible Shade Illusion on youtube
@Math Philic
I guess my reasoning was wrong !!
Its Gold And White !!!!!
When I first opened the note the very first imagewas literally white and gold and I was like why are they making such a huge debate but after some time when I opened the note agian it was blue & black, I was like what the heck,how it can be?
Ps: now every time I open it appears blue and black.
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yes once you get to Blue &Black there is no going back to White&Gold. I deliberately went from W&G to B&B , to get the other perspective.
Don't worry the number of victims has been increased to more than 6,000.This Is Epidemic.
It is actually gold and white in white light, and blue and black in indigo light.. Thats how it appears...
Really a nice trick , whosoever has played it , I still see White and Gold . If I am proved to be wrong , I don't think that I'll have any other option but to retire into isolation ans solitude !!!!
It is just a cool gif....
Theory 1: It’s a hoax
I see blue with black. Anyone who claims to see white with gold has got to be trolling me. Right?
Wrong. Because it’s easy to find somebody you know, somebody you trust, somebody in your own family, who sees the photo with the “wrong” colors. For example, two of our own Yahoo Tech writers—straight shooters, truly good people who would gain nothing by humiliating me in public—swore to me that they see the dress as white and gold.
Theory 2: We’re using different kinds of screens
Do phones and laptop screens show two different things? Do different kinds of LCD panel show different colors?
No. Because in many, many cases, two people sitting side-by-side, looking at the same screen, see different colors.
Furthermore, many people see a different pair of colors when they look at the same photo on the same device later. Some say they can force their brains to go back and forth!
(This tweet from @Tmoldovan sums it up the frustrating bafflement: “Not a hoax, not a trick. Not brightness, nor emotions, nor angle. My kids see it as black and blue, my wife and I white and gold.”)
Theory 3: It’s science that you don’t understand
It wasn’t long before people began passing around technical articles about color perception.
Like this page of color-perception illusions, or this article from livescience.com. (“These receptors, called melanopsin, independently gauge the amount of blue or yellow incoming light, and route this information to parts of the brain involved in emotions and the regulation of the circadian rhythm.”)
That’s the explanation. Right?
Wrong. Because if people identify colors so wildly differently, we’d have arguments about color names all the time. It wouldn’t take some stupid photo of a dress in 2015 to discover this phenomenon.
Theory 4: Half of you are just nuts
People soon started using Photoshop’s eye-dropper tool to identify the colors of the photo for sure. This site, for example, “proves” that the colors are blue and brown by using Photoshop to sample the stripes.
image Also, it didn’t take long for someone to hunt down the actual dress. As in, for sale, from a British store called Roman Originals. It is, in real life, blue and black:
image That’s it, then! Mystery solved! Right?
Wrong. Because we’re not talking about the JPEG image, and we’re not talking about the original dress; we’re talking about the photograph of the dress. And that means that factors like whitebalance are at play. “The backlighting throws off the sensor” of the camera,explains one commenter.
Theory 5: Your brain might be compensating for shadow
This diagram, posted to Reddit by user Chris Conlon, offers a tantalizing theory that avoids the pitfalls of the others listed here: Some brains assume that the photo was taken in shadow, and other brains don’t. In his diagram here, you see what’s inside the shaded rectangle here, and your brain infers that the dress looks like what’s on the outer portion:
image "I’m pretty sure this is an illusion similar to the checker-shadow illusion," he writes. "Some people are seeing it as a white and gold dress in a bluish shadow; others are seeing it as a black and blue dress in a yellowish light, as seen here."
(The checker-shadow illusion is this one, where square B looks much lighter than square A, thanks to the “shadow” cast on it. In fact, both squares are the same shade of grey. You can prove it to yourself by covering up all but a tiny bit of each square.)
image Now we’re getting closer; read on.
The color-blindness theory
In an effort not to lose the last of my marbles, I wrote to Dr. Stephen McLeod, chairman of UCSF’s ophthalmology department. He gave an explanation that nobody had yet offered:
"I think it’s really just a sensitive test of red-green color deficiency, which is pretty common. I’ll bet most of the people calling it black are men. It’s consistent with cone deficiency, and red-green would do it for this hue."
That notion makes a lot of sense, actually; the dress-color test works exactly like those Ishihara colorblindness tests, where some people can see a number hiding among the dots, and red-green colorblind people cannot:
image "If you go to the gold/black area [of the dress photo] and blow the image way up, people who see gold will see that the clusters of pixels are basically reds (pinks) and greens (olives)," Dr. McLeod went on. "They merge to give the summated color. If you have red-green deficiency, you’ll see just black."
He’s right on that last part. I’m red-green colorblind. I see black in those areas. And I cannot see white/gold in the dress image no matter how hard I try.
If McLeod’s theory is true, you’d expect many more people would see white/gold than blue/black—and, in fact, that’s what the numbers show. According to a Buzzfeed poll so far taken by over 1.2 million people, 73 percent see white/gold.
But wait: 27 percent of the poll-takers see blue/black in the dress. But only 7 to 10 percent of the male population have red-green colorblindness. So what about the rest of the blue/black-seers?
And what about people who can make their perception switch back and forth between white/gold and blue/black?
"I’m guessing that across the population, the phenomenon is a combination of red-green deficiency and context," Dr. McLeod says.
In other words, there’s a second factor at work: the context of the lighting and time of day.
Color-extraction theory says that our brains correct color according to the visual context. As Wellesley College neuroscientist Bevil Conway told Wired: “Your visual system is looking at this thing, and you’re trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis. So people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black.”
All the experts agree that this is one of the most intriguing color-perception puzzles to come along in a long time. It works only because of these particular colors in this particular photograph: a freak of photography, light, and color.
The experts also agree that it’s not an especially gorgeous dress.