I see it as light blue and gold. I was looking at it on several different sites and devices last night, and cannot understand how anyone sees the gold as black or the light blue as either dark blue or white. I read explanations, and saw enhanced photos with the white balance shifted to demonstrate the black and blue and white and gold, but cannot see any other colors in the original no matter what I do.
If I cover the background as suggested, I can kinda get a sense of the black and blue, but it's not strong.
I tend to see the white/gold at first, but if I scroll the screen so that the top part of the dress is off the screen and I'm only looking at the bottom third, I can get it to change to blue/black.
Like Lady Shea, I saw it originally as blue/gold. I saw it in a small caption on the BBC website and it looked white/gold, and when I looked at it on their website I still saw it as white/gold. But when I refreshed the page, I saw it as blue/gold and I still see it as blue/gold.
I'm glad Lady Shea also sees it as light blue/gold or I'd be thinking my brain is seriously weird.
Just playing and doing as Ceptimus suggested, the gold can appear black if I don't see the top part of the image, and I don't look too hard at the gold. But the moment I do, I see it's gold.
(Incidentally, the actual image colours are blue/gold. The dress is blue/black, I believe.)
__________________ The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. -Eugene Wigner
00:50 "every time I point it straight at the sun, there's a very slight purplish hue in all of my photos. What is that?"
When I take photos of receipts inside the car at certain times of the day they definitely turn blue. I saw the dress as white but photo tinted blue, and gold. Can't see the black no matter what. What is wrong with you guys' eyes?
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Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant
I spent. all. goldanged. day. yesterday looking at that monster dress, not being able to see the black and blue despite adjusting the brightness and the ambient light and looking at it on different devices. I saw white and gold, unquestionably, with a slight 'twilight' tinge.
I read and mostly understood the explanations, looked at the original dress (which is apparently black and blue) and the transformation videos, blocked off different areas of the picture, and still couldn't see the black at all. The blue, a little bit, but it was unconvincing. The black was just no way.
Then I opened up my tablet to complain about it, probably to Matlock, and blammo, it was black and blue, unquestioningly, and I couldn't fathom how I ever saw it as anything else.
It has remained white and gold on my computer, but it's starting to look like it's permanently blue and black on my tablet now. Computer-me thinks tablet-me is crazy and wrong, and vice versa.
This is it, isn't it? This is how I die. I get in a vicious fistfight with myself over a picture of an ugly dress.
I can top that! I viewed the post just an hour ago, and all I could see was powder blue and gold, no matter what I did. Now returning to the post, all I see is darker blue and brown. Same computer.
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hide, witch, hide / the good folks come to burn thee / their keen enjoyment hid behind / a gothic mask of duty - P. Kantner
Thanks, XKCD. That tells me something I already knew. It's a crappy picture of an ugly dress. According to that diagram, the dress should appear darker. The exposure on the original picture is so turnt up it washes out any trueness of color. And trueness of color is already a sketchy thing.
I can't see anything but dark blue and black, even if I cover up the background and look away and look back and shit. From the way I see it, I can't even imagine it appearing as something close to white or gold. Maybe a slightly lighter blue and a very dark golden brown, but that's as close as I can get.
Maybe I am just more used to seeing white things (snow, mainly) in the shade or dusk/dawn (so it looks blue) and my mind compensates, assuming that is what is going on. I would be interested to see a breakdown of the demographics of the two teams based on the climate and amount and type of sunlight the people are acclimatised to.
I can't see anything but dark blue and black, even if I cover up the background and look away and look back and shit. From the way I see it, I can't even imagine it appearing as something close to white or gold. Maybe a slightly lighter blue and a very dark golden brown, but that's as close as I can get.
Is it my monitor? Is it me? It's me, isn't it?
I can force myself to see it as white/gold or blue/brown. I don't ever see it as dark blue/black. I have also tried to resurrect enough badly exposed photos to know that sometimes black winds up red or golden brown if you brighten it too much, so it doesn't bother me that I know it supposed to be black but I don't see black.
I think the thing that is freaking everybody out is that it shows exactly how unreliable and mutable our perception of color is. People want to think that color is an immutable property of an object, not something vaguely defined by the ambient light and context.
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Did you know that the bug pictures I just took? The bug was lit from above, but I was getting reflections off the glass slide, so I lit it from below as well. The trouble is, the microscope light easily overpowers my diffused light above, but if I drop the halogen light to a low power, it gets very yellow.
I adjusted that by putting a blue filter over the light - got it back to white light. I guess my point is that color is more mutable than we generally consider.
I think the thing that is freaking everybody out is that it shows exactly how unreliable and mutable our perception of color is. People want to think that color is an immutable property of an object, not something vaguely defined by the ambient light and context.
There are other color illusions, though, that show that. This one is especially weird in how unambiguous it seems until the colors have flipped on you. Two different people can be looking at the same image on the same device in the same place and see completely different colors, and not even be able to grasp that it could look like anything else.
And then it happens to you. And the color combination you found so implausible before now seems unambiguous. That's what's wigging me out. I understand the general principles behind how it's happening, but visually, I cannot reconcile the white-gold version I see sometimes with the blue-black version I see other times. I did manage to will myself to swap them once as I was looking at it, and I'm probably going to spend a stupid amount of time practicing that now.
And here's an interview with a color vision researcher getting weirded out by it, too, so it's not just ignorance of the phenomenon that's making it seem freaky.
Quote:
"Now I'm going to spend the rest of my life working on this," he told me. "I thought I was going to cure blindness, but now I guess I'll do this."
Anyways, one trick I tried to switch the colors back to white and gold after I switched was that I went through this thread and watched a bunch of other optical illusions in order to overload my brain. So maybe that'd work the other way too. It's worth trying for those who haven't switched it, because the effect is not subtle at all.
I do love how the internet and much of the rest of the world just ground to a halt to stare at a picture of a dress.
Re: Optical illusions
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