Slashdot Mirror
Is That Dress White and Gold Or Blue and Black?
HughPickens.com writes Color scientists already have a word for it: Dressgate. Now the Washington Post reports that a puzzling thing happened on Thursday night consuming millions — perhaps tens of millions — across the planet and trending on Twitter ahead of even Jihadi John's identification. The problem was this: Roughly three-fourths of people swore that this dress was white and gold, according to BuzzFeed polling but everyone else said it's dress was blue. Others said the dress could actually change colors. So what's going on? According to the NYT our eyes are able to assign fixed colors to objects under widely different lighting conditions. This ability is called color constancy. But the photograph doesn't give many clues about the ambient light in the room. Is the background bright and the dress in shadow? Or is the whole room bright and all the colors are washed out? If you think the dress is in shadow, your brain may remove the blue cast and perceive the dress as being white and gold. If you think the dress is being washed out by bright light, your brain may perceive the dress as a darker blue and black.
According to Beau Lotto, the brain is doing something remarkable and that's why people are so fascinated by this dress. "It's entertaining two realities that are mutually exclusive. It's seeing one reality, but knowing there's another reality. So you're becoming an observer of yourself. You're having tremendous insight into what it is to be human. And that's the basis of imagination." As usual xkcd has the final word. It would make the comments more informatively scannable if you include your perceived color pair in the title of any comments below.
According to Beau Lotto, the brain is doing something remarkable and that's why people are so fascinated by this dress. "It's entertaining two realities that are mutually exclusive. It's seeing one reality, but knowing there's another reality. So you're becoming an observer of yourself. You're having tremendous insight into what it is to be human. And that's the basis of imagination." As usual xkcd has the final word. It would make the comments more informatively scannable if you include your perceived color pair in the title of any comments below.
It's primarily an effect of the camera fooling around with the white balance and contrast/light to try to get a correct image and failed.
Add to it that the picture looks different depending on which display you have on your computer and you have a nice debate.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
If you see the white/gold image, scroll down the page below the image, squint, and slowly scroll up from the bottom. You will see the blue/black.
The BBC also show the actual dress:
Optical illusion: Dress colour debate goes global
I see white and gold, although the actual dress is blue and black.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
Here is a pretty good explanation of why this might happen.
Why is it that my mod points always expire right *before* I want to use them? I used eight of fifteen purely on posts where I only sort of wanted to mod. I had to give up commenting to do so. Here, I log in so as to mod -- and my mod points are gone. And I have no real interest in commenting!
Grrrr.
Anyway, regardless of the general quality (or lack thereof) of gizmodo, this was a decent explanation. It points out that in the picture, the colors are pale blue and dark gold. However, the original dress is a darker blue and black. The colors in the picture are incorrect. People who see it as blue and black are seeing past the problems with the picture while those who see white and gold are being fooled by the bad colors in the image.
Actual dress is the blue and black one on the left in this picture: http://media.gotraffic.net/ima...