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.
From any angle, it looks blue to me. Very distinctly blue. I'm actually somewhat baffled that anyone (nevermind the majority of people) perceives it as white and gold.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
Couldn't Slashdot post the image in the summary? I mean, it's not even like it'd be an illustration; this article is literally all about a specific image.
You can do it with annoying autoplaying videos, so why not a simple JPEG?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
This morning, I saw it on my phone in my darkened bedroom, and it was clearly blue and brown. Just now, I opened the Washington Post link on my 24" screen in a sunlit room, and it was clearly white and gold. I then found the link that I had seen on my phone this morning (not Washington Post, so I wanted to confirm that it just wasn't two different pictures that I was looking at), opened it up, and it was white and gold there too. Went back to my bedroom and closed the curtains, and it remained white and gold for a bit, but after I left the room (after my eyes had adjusted a bit to the darkness), it was blue and brown again. The picture on the Washington Post was also now blue and brown. Now that my eyes have adjusted to the sunlit room again (and the white Slashdot background), I switch back to the Washington Post tab, and it's white and gold again. My wife (who's now gotten fed up with following me around to look at this picture under different lighting conditions) has had pretty much the same experience as me.
So it appears to be linked to the lighting conditions that your eyes are adjusted to when seeing the image initially... even after they've adjusted to the ambient light, the brain appears to stick to the image it created initially.
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
Put it into to Photoshop and eye-dropper the colours. They are quantitatively light blue and dark brown.
But they can perceived as either blue and black or white and gold.
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...