The Dress

[Adamgp]

Looks gold to me.

 

[CodeRedR51]

This is quite honestly the stupidest thing I have seen blow up on the internet in years.

 

[Xenn]

https://twitter.com/PlayStationAU/status/571176841777516544

Hehe...well played Sony.

 

[KSaiyu]

What happens if you see red and green?

 

[ImaRobot]

This is quite honestly the stupidest thing I have seen blow up on the internet in years.

I think its humorous. Its good banter, especially when hanging with friends having a drink. Gives something to argue about.

 

[Legro]

I've seen this on three screens now. It's still blue/black.

 

[Famine]

Anyway, I have to go kill some Thalmor - nuts to the Blue-Black Concordat.

 

[G.T.Ace]

https://twitter.com/PlayStationAU/status/571176841777516544

Hehe...well played Sony.

 

[DK]

Well, this is weird: it appeared blue and black (or maybe very very very very dark blue )to me when my laptop's screen was darkened, and now that it's been brightened, it's white and gold!

 

[Robin]

If I stare at it a long time it shifts between colours, I can actually see it fluidly changing.

So this is the science behind what is happening...

So, why do people see different colors in the dress?

Bevil Conway, associate professor of neuroscience at Wellesley College, told FoxNews.com that the dress plays on core aspects of brain science.

“This dress was very carefully crafted, either by accident or design, for a combination of colors that doesn’t resolve unambiguously,” he said.

Our brains and visual systems don’t want to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty in what they are seeing, according to Conway, so our brains do backflips to “make it sensible.”

The professor explained that our brains have evolved to discount certain lighting conditions which we see all the time, which may explain the wild variations in how people see the dress.

“Some people are getting rid of the orange side of the daylight axis, they see the dress as blue and black,” he explained. “Some people are getting rid of the blue side, and they see the dress as gold and white.”

For the record, Conway sees the dress as orange and blue.

Wired provided some more context on the science behind the dress debate, noting that light enters the eye through the lens, with different wavelengths corresponding to different colors. The light hits the retina in the back of the eye where pigments fire up neural connections to the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes those signals into an image. The brain then figures out what color light is bouncing off the thing your eyes are looking at.

The dress, however, hits some sort of “perceptual boundary,” according to Wired, prompting confusion about its illuminating and reflecting colors.

“Our visual system is supposed to throw away information about the illuminant and extract information about the actual reflectance,” Jay Neitz, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington, told Wired. “But I’ve studied individual differences in color vision for 30 years, and this is one of the biggest individual differences I’ve ever seen.”

So it's basically some magical space and time ripping dress that bends the laws of physics, I say we stick it in the Hadron Collider and see what happens.

 

[Maccer_42]

It's white and gold to me clearly, with the white having a slight blue tint.

 

[shoemaker]

this is so pointless.who actually cares.crappy quality picture of a white/gold dress.changing backgrounds doesnt do anything.

 

[Famine]

So this is the science behind what is happening...

For reference, no it isn't.

It's a poorly-shot photograph with bad white balance that some uncalibrated screens will not display faithfully. The dress itself is clearly royal blue and black, but the shot is an awful representation of it because either the camera was awful and the lighting was awful or it has been messed about with. Or both. The pixels actually are white-blue (blue hue, poorly saturated, brightly lit) and beige (orange hue, poorly saturated, medium brightness), so if you're seeing something else you need to calibrate the screen.

No-one who sees the picture, whatever colour they see, should be seeing what the dress looks like in the promotional shots I posted.

 

[eight6er]

It's white and gold on my laptop screen and if I tilt my screen so it's facing upwards I can make it look black and blue.

 

[Robin]

this is so pointless.who actually cares.crappy quality picture of a white/gold dress.changing backgrounds doesnt do anything.

Because the actual dress isn't white and gold... that's what's so interesting! From a research point of view it's quite fascinating. I'm sure people who study this stuff would dream to have such a large test group to analyse and it reiterates that vision is made up in our heads and can be manipulated.

For reference, no it isn't.

It's a poorly-shot photograph with bad white balance that some uncalibrated screens will not display faithfully. The dress itself is clearly royal blue and black, but the shot is an awful representation of it because either the camera was awful and the lighting was awful or it has been messed about with. Or both. The pixels actually are white-blue (blue hue, poorly saturated, brightly lit) and beige (orange hue, poorly saturated, medium brightness), so if you're seeing something else you need to calibrate the screen.

No-one who sees the picture, whatever colour they see, should be seeing what the dress looks like in the promotional shots I posted.

Yes the picture is terrible and I know what the real dress looks like (properly photographed) but its about how people are perceiving THAT image. Are you saying the fact people see the picture differently is solely down to what they are viewing it on and that there is no biological factors going on?

 

[ImaRobot]

No-one who sees the picture, whatever colour they see, should be seeing what the dress looks like in the promotional shots I posted.

Definitely not. From my point of view, I could have been more exact on blue/black. I just ment that it was a blue and black hue. I noticed that I wasn't guessing exactly what color was on that picture, but more rather, what color do I think the materials actually are, after considering it being washed-out.

 

[Famine]

Yes the picture is terrible and I know what the real dress looks like (properly photographed) but its about how people are perceiving THAT image. Are you saying the fact people see the picture differently is solely down to what they are viewing it on and that there is no biological factors going on?

Almost certainly.

 

[Robin]

Almost certainly.

That's fair enough.

I also thought it was poorly calibrated monitors, what threw me was that if I stared at it long enough on any screen I could make the colours flip between the two.

Also examples in this thread stating that they or others saw different things on the same monitor could suggest that it lies on a perception boundary and coupled poor or accurate calibration, can either exacerbate or reduce the ambiguity of the colours. Just my take on it.

 

[Northstar]

This whole thing sounds like a plot from Seinfeld.

Anyways it's nice that people that people are arguing over something rather light-hearted instead of the crap people usually argue about.

 

[DQuaN]

Almost certainly.

I disagree. In the office we all looked at the same image on the same screen. Some people said white and gold and others said blue and black.

 

[Famine]

I disagree. In the office we all looked at the same image on the same screen. Some people said white and gold and others said blue and black.

Then some of you are mad, or that screen is particularly bad for viewing angle.

 

[DQuaN]

We also looked at it on an iPhone. Same result.

Simple to test really. Find two people that see it differently and get them both to view it together on the same screen. Do you and Mrs Famine see it the same?

 

[dylansan]

There's no doubt it's a terrible photo. They may as well have put an instagram filter on it first. No one should be surprised that it doesn't look blue and black because those aren't the colors in the image.

I personally haven't been able to see it as anything but light blue and bronzy brown. Perhaps it's because I've been doing a lot of color related stuff lately and seeing true colors has taken priority over seeing color in context.

If people are seeing blue and black, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss biological inluences. It's not an illusion per-se, but seeing what isn't there(blue and black) is definitely the result of your brain doing some kind of extra work to make sense of what it's seeing (white/blue and gold).

 

[ImaRobot]

Then some of you are mad, or that screen is particularly bad for viewing angle.

Had the same instance with my girlfriend. Both of us looking at my iPhone screen I pointed out blue and black, and pointed directly to which was blue, yet she would say white. Like mentioned though, I was pointing out what I figured it would be, she was going directly off the image(or at least that's all I can assume.)

This should be part of the test for becoming a Pilot.

 

[Wiz]

I'm with DQuaN.

I just had 10 people sit down at my work computer and tried as best as I could to get them to look at it from the same height & angle.

So same screen, same angle, same height.

6 for white/gold
4 for blue/black, which is what I see.

 

[Famine]

We also looked at it on an iPhone. Same result.

I'm going for madness again.

It just isn't an optical illusion. Unless you're physically colourblind (try the test I posted earlier), you shouldn't see it any differently on the same device to anyone else.

Simple to test really. Find two people that see it differently and get them both to view it together on the same screen. Do you and Mrs Famine see it the same?

We do.

 

[Robin]

I'm with DQuaN.

I just had 10 people sit down at my work computer and tried as best as I could to get them to look at it from the same height & angle.

So same screen, same angle, same height.

6 for white/gold
4 for blue/black, which is what I see.

That seems to pretty much mirror how the whole internet and even GTPlanet is divided on this. Roughly 60/40.

 

[G.T.Ace]

 

[F1GTR]

I can only see it as blueish/black(well brown really). I'm using a properly calibrated monitor, and I did that test @Famine posted a few pages back years ago and got a perfect score. The only way I see white/gold is if I adjust the image in Photoshop by brightening it to the point where the blue and brown start to shift in hue/saturation.

 

[Robin]

Kanye said Kim had one of the best dresses of all time...