The "Viral" Colour-Confusion Thing

[cuttime]

You kids nowadays. In my day the internet was good for Kim Kardashian's butt.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

You kids nowadays. In my day the internet was good for Kim Kardashian's butt.

That was the main reason the www#2 was invented.

[cuttime]

www#2 .

Oooh. A new Twitter Hashtag! I'll have to check it out!

[James Steele]

I don't know... I always saw a sort of light blue with gold/brown. But this is all a function of the white balance of the camera and the fact that it's in shade, IMO. Looks like the dress is white/gold-ish, but it's in the shade and the camera white balance isn't set properly hence the blueish cast.

[bayswater]

If you see black, I see RED! I'll grant you that the "white" looks blue in that light and the gold is more mustard, but black? Really?

Not so much black, but definitely grey or a washed out black. If I show this to others, most do not see gold or white, but some do. Most see blue for sure and washed out black.

Maybe it has to do with the monitor you look at.

[bayswater]

At least we can all agree on one thing: The people who see the dress as white are utterly, completely wrong.

- Wired

I agree, anyone that sees a black and blue dress is either nuts or lying.

No matter where I have seen the dress (TV, desktop computer, iPad, Youtube) it is always white and gold.
I always have thought that at least half the world is mad, here is some proof.

As usual, you're looking at it upside down.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Ha ha ha!

[BKK-OZ]

As usual, you're looking at it upside down.

[bayswater]

I understand you get used to it after a while.

[BKK-OZ]

Just like you must be used to this..

[bayswater]

You can get tips on surviving bear attacks compiled from interviews with the 200 or so people that have done it in the last 150 years. But so such advice on cougars -- there haven't been enough survivors.

[HCMarkus]

You can get tips on surviving bear attacks compiled from interviews with the 200 or so people that have done it in the last 150 years. But so such advice on cougars -- there haven't been enough survivors.

I've survived a few cougars… just told 'em I was married, turned back to the bar and had another drink.

PS: LOL'd at the Aussie helicopter.

[Shooshie]

Just curious as to what you guys see.

There are pictures that show it in various lighting. None of them are black & blue, and none of them are white & gold. You see sort of a lavender and chocolate, or you see sort of a cool beige and butterscotch caramel. It's the way of crowds to reduce details to extremes, so that those choices become "black/white" or "blue/gold." And anyone who has seen color illusions (you can find a thousand of them with a quick Google search) knows that in colors, the context is everything. That is, surrounding colors make things look other than as they are. All colors, like sounds, are relative to whatever reference points you compare it to. That's why every video camera has a white balance. That's why our monitors have these setup pages with configurations you can save. (Flip through those configurations and you'll see at least a little of that at work on the dress.

You get used to a configuration, then change to another one, and for a while everything looks off color, say, too red. Then you get used to that, and going back everything seems too blue.

Who hasn't taken pictures with color film, daylight adjusted, in tungsten light? It makes a very cozy red glow that warms interior pictures in National Geographic. But use tungsten adjusted film in daylight, and everything becomes baby-blue.

So, it's not hard to see why there are so many theories on this color thing, and yet people are letting their minds tell them that the colors are "black and blue" when they really see lavender and chocolate. Or White & Gold when it's cool beige (I think the color is called "Clay Rose") and warm caramel.

There's not really a "gold" color, anyway. It's a tinted reflection, like silver. But I've already droned on too long. It's just another way of saying

"It's all in your heads, folks! All in your heads!"
...and your monitor configurations!

Shooshie

• (whose head is telling him it's time for bed!)

[Shooshie]

One more thing...

I came across this in the geek comic, XKCD [<—blue dress comic link]:

First, however, I must plug XKCD [<—daily link] as one of the brightest comics ever to grace the Internet. It's amazing. If you have the time, go back to the first comic, then follow it as far as you can. Or go backward from today's comic. It doesn't matter; it's all great. Some of it is very esoteric, and occasionally out of my reach, but most are a delight. Hover the mouse for a 2nd punch line in every comic.



The colors in all three images of the dress are identical. Maybe hard to imagine, but it's true, and you can sample them yourself if you don't believe it.

Shooshie

[monkey man]

Agreed, 'Meister. That comic looks cool too.

Yes, many things including sense of heat, colour, sound, pressure, pain, gravity / weight, bitter / sweetness, saltiness, funniness, sadness, annoyance factor, beauty, glare, how fat / skinny / tall / short someone or something is... er... perhaps not many things, but practically all perceptions are not just context-sensitive, but IMHO context-dependant. Senses absent from the point of birth prevent some folks from ever forming any sort of reference, without which many judgements become impossible.

This is why I asked whether those who glance at the subject title on the article's page see a difference between the black they see in the picture and the undeniably-black colour of the large, bold type. The fact that said "reference" appears on the same page ameliorates, at least in part, colour-temperature and, perhaps more importantly, brightness / contrast factors, along with viewing conditions' effects as both are "equally" subject to them.

No matter how I view it, that browny-gold colour is simply nowhere near black. Far from it. Very far.

Thank you all for chiming in, 'Cornies.