Blue and Black Dress or White and Gold Percentage
So what's really up with this dress that's causing the Internet to split into two hostile factions?
A picture of an otherwise unremarkable dress appeared on Tumblr Thursday(Opens in a new window) with a provocative plea from poster Swiked:
"Guys please help me—is this dress white and gold, or blue and black? Me and my friends can't agree and we are freaking the f*** out."
The issue picked up steam when BuzzFeed asked the Internet to weigh in(Opens in a new window). And indeed, as more and more people looked at the original photo of the dress (below), and reported the colors they saw, it became clear that something very freaky was going on here. Some saw gold and white, while others were just as confident that the dress was black and blue. What the heck was going on?
It turns out that the majority of people see the body of the dress as white (often with a bluish tint) and the frilly vertical stripes as gold (or goldish with some rustiness). A vocal minority, however, insists that the dress is dark blue with black stripes.
Color Crazy Dress/Credit: Swiked A Buzzfeed poll suggests about 72 percent of people think the dress is white and gold, while 28 percent perceive it as blue and black. Another online poll reflects a much narrower difference of opinion(Opens in a new window), nearly a 50-50 split.
For the record, the dress does not have chameleon-like qualities. Internet sleuths have tracked down photos(Opens in a new window) of the actual garment in the wild and it has a definite color scheme—it's blue and black.
So why do so many of us (myself included) see it as white and gold?
Initial theories about why people were seeing such different colors revolved around the broad range of viewing platforms we were all presumably using to view the dress photo. Were you looking at in on a phone or on a larger screen? How high was the brightness turned up in your screen settings? What operating system and browser were you using?
But it turns out that different people see the dress differently even when viewing the image on the same device at the same angle in the same lighting conditions. In my household, three out of four of us see the dress as white and gold. The fourth person is dead to the rest of us.
Again, what the heck is going on here? Wired did the logical thing and asked scientists(Opens in a new window).
The way our eyes and brains work together is that "[w]ithout you having to worry about it, your brain figures out what color light is bouncing off the thing your eyes are looking at, and essentially subtracts that color from the 'real' color of the object," the site explained. Our visual processing has evolved to do this and most of the time we all mostly agree on what we're seeing, even when our brains are "tricking" us into seeing the wrong thing in the case of many familiar optical illusions.
In the case of most optical illusions, staring at the image for long enough reveals the hidden truth for you, even if it may take longer to get there than it does for some other people.
But the dress is different. Some people (like me) can't see anything but white and gold no matter how long we stare at this image. Others, like one of my sons, who is currently being written out of the will, only ever see blue and black. Still others say they perceive a change from white and gold to blue and black if they stare at the image long enough, and there is even a tiny minority of people who report seeing colors like orange and red in the dress.
The first explanation that comes to mind here is color blindness, right? We know that a percentage of the population has trouble distinguishing between certain colors that the rest of us have no trouble identifying. Could that be why different people see the dress so differently?
Perhaps, but if the informal Internet polling is even remotely accurate, the numbers just don't add up to suggest color blindness is at play. The medical literature suggests that less than 10 percent of the population is afflicted with some form of color blindness—certainly not half of us, let alone nearly three-quarters of all humans.
Instead, what seems to be happening is that this particular image of a dress is a kind of perfect storm of visual stimulus that separates us into three distinct visual camps (white-and-golders, blue-and-blackers, and change-perceivers, plus the red/orange/whatever outliers who we can all agree are the real weirdos).
The dress, for whatever reason, seems to exaggerate what are usually negligible differences in the way our different individual visual processing systems compensate for lighting and contrast and other cues to get to truth in what we're seeing, Jay Neitz, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington, told Wired.
"Our visual system is supposed to throw away information about the illuminant and extract information about the actual reflectance," Neitz said. "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."
Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist at Wellesley College, further explained the mechanics of the thing.
"What's happening here is your visual system is looking at this thing, and you're trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis," Conway told Wired. "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."
Got it? The real problem here is that some of you fools are discounting the gold side ... who even are you?
Get Our Best Stories!
Sign up for What's New Now to get our top stories delivered to your inbox every morning.
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
Source: https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-blue-black-white-gold-dress-that-sparked-an-internet-war
0 Response to "Blue and Black Dress or White and Gold Percentage"
Post a Comment