Can you solve the mystery of the Gold/Blue Dress? | Hacker News Reader

Can you solve the mystery of the Gold/Blue Dress?

buzzfeed.com

9 pointsTruthSHIFT13 comments

If I stare at it and let my eyes go unfocused it starts to look blue and black but when my eyes are focused it look white and gold. Also for me the distance from the screen matters. Close up it looks white/gold and far away it looks blue/black.

If you crop the image and just look at the top 1/3 I bet more people would say it is white/gold. If you crop it so that you only see the bottom 1/3 I bet more people would say blue/black.

It's a white dress with golden/brown accents lit by a cold blue light from behind the camera.

That messes with people's perception of color since the store seen in the background is lit by a warm light. People who see it as blue are intuitively correcting for the light of the background.

It's a simple optical illusion easy to replicate:

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/col-context/index.html

Ok. My wife and I can only see White and Gold. However, she has several friends that insist that the dress is Blue and Black. I'm trying to come up with possible technical reasons for the discrepancy. My best guess is that AMOLED displays are displaying the colors differently than conventional displays. Can anyone test?

Nope. My buddy and I just looked at the same screen and saw different colors.

It's probably a genetic quirk?

This appears to be the store that sells the dress (listed as blue).

http://www.romanoriginals.co.uk/invt/70931

My wife insists that it is white and gold. And I see blue and a light brown.

Is it possible that different images are being displayed randomly depending upon cached media or something strange like that? I don't favor a physiological explanation, this seems like a technical issue.

No, you can have people in the same room look at the exact same image on the same screen at the exact same time and describe vastly different colors. I've been trying this with my co-founder. We've tried different monitors, angles, screen, and so forth. I consistently see white/gold. He sees blue/black. Physiological is the only explanation that makes sense to me.

Ok, I believe you, I have pulled in several coworkers who haven't seen it yet and I am convinced that they are not trolling me. Half of us see white/gold (including myself) and half see blue/black. We are arguing.

Here's the most reasonable explanation I've heard: https://twitter.com/andyrexford/status/571118728164872192/ph...

photoshop color picker says dress is Blue and Dark brown.

I see it as blue and dark brown, too.

does that mean camera have seen it as blue?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com