The Dress

I see light blue stripes and brown or dark beige stripes. There MIGHT be a bit of goldish fringe on some of the brown stripes.

[edit]My wife says she sees white and gold. Both of us looking at the same monitor at the same time.[/edit]

 

My wife and I see white and gold.

 

Oh, this is weird: yesterday it was blue/black, on my phone. But at first glance today, this page on lcd monitor: white/gold. Conflicted.

 

^ I can top that one... when I first open the thread, it was gold/white, scrolled down and back up it is blue/black. Must be an animated gif.

 

white and gold, but i got a picture of it yesterday on a text and it looked black and blue. went back today and it looks white and gold as above.

 

I see it that way too.

Here's Randall Munroe's take on it:



If you overlap the images, the two dresses are identical colors.

 

The other Prius driver here sees black and blue. I see gold and white. I'm itching to get an optical spectrum analyzer to tell me what the actual spectral reality is. Everyone viewing is seeing it just thru the three color components of their display, so that makes the effect even more intriguing. Soon or later, a whole book of photos like this will be printed and sold...and I would buy one.

 

but when two people see difference on the same screen?

 

Very easy to do it in Photoshop:
The Science of Why No One Agrees on the Color of This Dress | WIRED

 

This reminds me of "Tim's Vermeer": there some discussion of discerning colors with varying background colors, how it's pretty much impossible.

Ok, think I see what's happening: there's a blue "color cast", and if you get through that, it's white/gold. If you don't get through it, it's blue/black.

 

Thanks for that post. But there is still a missing piece of the puzzle and I think it has to do with texture. [Short detour-Silver and Gold are not colors, but white and yellow with a lot of specularity. A "metallic" finish on a car is just paint with a lot of microscopic light and dark spots created by reflecting light irregularly at a very small scale.] It may be the biological perception tendency to view textures as specific colors. It would be extremely similar to the question "What color is a mirror?" The stock answer is silver, but what is viewed in the mirror is not silver...so why do we perceive the mirror to be silver? I think something like that may be in play here.

 

that's how tom hanks got his start.

 

So far, all the internet controversy has been between people who are looking at pictures of the dress on a monitor, so the spectra that everybody's looking at are just made up of spikes at primary red, green, and blue.

(Now, it's possible not everybody's monitor uses the exact same 3 wavelengths for the primaries; there's an 'sRGB' standard that includes an agreement on just what colors are meant by primary red, green, and blue, and if the LEDs, dyes, or phosphors in your monitor aren't exactly those, the system ought to do some calculations to compensate, but monitors aren't all calibrated equally carefully....)

Now, if you bought that dress and pointed your spectrum analyzer right at it on a sunny day, of course you'd see a spectrum way different from isolated red, green, and blue spikes.

-Chap

 

but why do two people, looking at the same pic on the computer, see different colors?

 

Those two people's brains have learned different heuristics for discounting what they infer the overall illuminating color was in the scene.

New Scientist article....

-Chap

 

Take a look at the spinning dancer on the link below. With some patience you can see the spin direction change.

Spinning Dancer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The reason you can see one direction or the other...and have both be correct...is because photos or 2D simplification of real situations force the brain to pick an answer that occurs first when both are compatible with real physics. In the real world this situation doesn't occur hardly ever. If we saw the dress in real life, then we would see the black and blue. But since the photo moved the actual colors into an range that is also compatible with the same photo colors of a gold and white dress under different lighting conditions, the brain chooses the first one computed.