Color scientists already have a word for it: Dressgate. Now the Washington Post reports that a puzzling thing happened on Thursday night consuming millions — perhaps tens of millions — across the planet and trending on Twitter ahead of even Jihadi John’s identification. The problem was this: Roughly three-fourths of people swore that this dress was white and gold, according to BuzzFeed polling but everyone else said it's dress was blue. Others said the dress could actually change colors. So what's going on? According to the NYT our eyes are able to assign fixed colors to objects under widely different lighting conditions. This ability is called color constancy. But the photograph doesn’t give many clues about the ambient light in the room. Is the background bright and the dress in shadow? Or is the whole room bright and all the colors are washed out? If you think the dress is in shadow, your brain may remove the blue cast and perceive the dress as being white and gold. If you think the dress is being washed out by bright light, your brain may perceive the dress as a darker blue and black.
According to Beau Lotto, the brain is doing something remarkable and that's why people are so fascinated by this dress. “It’s entertaining two realities that are mutually exclusive. It’s seeing one reality, but knowing there’s another reality. So you’re becoming an observer of yourself. You’re having tremendous insight into what it is to be human. And that’s the basis of imagination.” As usual xkcd has the final word.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Sunday March 01 2015, @02:11AM
except the dress is factually blue and black, so do you mean the people who see it as white/gold are a or b? because i don't see how you can say that the people who are seeing the colors that are actually there have a bad monitor or a form of color blindness.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2015, @02:02PM
Nobody is arguing that the dress itself is not black and blue, they are arguing that the PHOTO OF THE DRESS does not show the colours as black and blue.
It can be *objectively* demonstrated, using any image of photo-editing software you might like to pick out, that the "black" in the photo is actually a gold colour, and that the "blue" - reported by most to be white - is actually a pale blue.
(Score: 2) by khedoros on Monday March 02 2015, @08:34AM
The dress is blue and black, but its appearance in the image is undeniably, objectively, and measurably white and gold, due to tricks of the lighting. Some people find enough visual context in the image for their brain to do a color correction to perceive washed-out black and blue. Some people don't, and see the uncorrected colors. It's a silly thing to argue about.