Is my blue your blue? (2024)

Posted by theogravity 20 hours ago

Is my blue your blue? (2024)(ismy.blue)

646 points | 425 commentspage 4

hyperpape 19 hours ago|

I think this site is doing a binary search, so that you narrow down on a boundary.

It would be much funnier, and also more insightful, if it didn't do this and let you contradict yourself.

aaronharnly 19 hours ago|

Yeah, as I was toggling "blue" / "green" / "blue" / "green" I had the distinct sensation that it might just show me that I was in a region where I couldn't even make a consistent distinction.

MrZander 19 hours ago||

Interesting. Looking at each in isolation, my boundary is pretty far into Green territory. But when I look at the gradient, I would place it far closer to the center.

Also, I found that sometimes it looked like there were two colors. The top was green and bottom was blue. Maybe my monitor?

My_Name 5 hours ago||

Tried this on 2 monitors, made a difference of 77%-85%

I noticed that what I was actually seeing later on was 'is this more blue or green than the last colour' due to my eyes adjusting to the previous screen and just seeing the difference.

altairprime 12 hours ago||

My numbers kept varying wildly from 174 to 189, in the same patterns across multiple devices (initial number different from stable next-five results), so I tried a few things.

First I shifted the app to use P3 `oklch(.7066 .1611 $hue)` with range (150..210) centered on cyan at 180°, same as sRGB. No change, so it's not some sort of artifact of colorspaces. Then I upped it to 16 steps instead of 8. The window narrowed slightly, but the same first-then-the-rest shift kept happening. Finally I raised the random color static mask duration from 200ms to 5000ms. Scored 180 +/- 1. Huh. Makes sense, given the image persistence stuff I deal with.

So, for those seeing that same variability I'd recommend editing that first (local response override index-blah.js, search `, 200` replace `, 5000` by hand, reload page) to get a more stable result.

junon 7 hours ago||

> Your boundary is at hue 164, greener than 94% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.

No, turquoise is turquoise!!1

harrall 19 hours ago||

One of my eyes sees (very) slightly greener than the other one.

But with both eyes I got

> Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.

I should test with one eye.

B5C8ECB24DB47D1 3 hours ago|

Same here. 'My blue is not my blue', or yellow in my case. I realized this looking at the yellow doublet lines from Sodium vapor lamps: one of my eyes sees it greener than the other.

sega_sai 19 hours ago||

One thing that I find interesting when thinking about colour perception, is that even if two people agree that a given colour is red, there is no way to know (as far as I am aware) that they actually perceive it in the same way. Maybe the brain of one person paints it red, and another paints it differently, and there is no way to know as we can't get into other people's heads.

layer8 18 hours ago||

That’s assuming that there is something like a “true” internal color that external colors are mapped onto. I think it’s more likely that for the brain, “red” is just “that hue signal range that red things have”. Which is roughly the same for everyone (modulo color blindness), in the sense that if one person sees two objects as red, another person will also see them as the same color, and will perceive the same brightness and hue relation relative to other objects with adjacent brightness and/or hue.

Meaning, there is no absolute color, the brain just learns what things have the same color, and how similar or dissimilar they are in hue to other objects. And for example “cold” colors are cold because we associate them with cold things, not because of some independent “qualia”.

MarkLowenstein 15 hours ago|||

My suggestion is always to look at what colors people think "go together". A Westerner looking at a Chinese temple will say "ugh, saturated red, light blue, and gold, all together?" My own self looking at a shirt my Eastern European wife loves: "dark blue, gray, and orange, bleah". It suggests that depending on your culture, you may have adopted a different visual response, where blood color is harmonious with sky color, or something like that.

keane 19 hours ago|||

Quite right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

shagie 19 hours ago|||

I've got an anecdote that says that they don't.

If I'm looking at a certain color of green illumination and then cover one eye then the other, my perception of that color shifts slightly. It's still green, but with one eye it is "brighter" than the other eye.

rootusrootus 19 hours ago|||

yep, this is the sort of question I pose to my kids. “How can you know that what you see as blue is not what I see as red?”

VadimPR 19 hours ago||

I find that fascinating as well! I hope tech will give us the answer in our lifetimes.

dbcurtis 19 hours ago||

Who else tried with both eyes? A few years ago I had an implant to treat cataracts. It was notable at the time that the "new" eye was less yellow-tinted than the aged-in-place eye. I was told that the lens does yellow with age. Over time, my brain mostly adjusted, but on this test I did notice a subtle hue difference between eyes. Did anyone else try that experiment?

eecc 19 hours ago|

Can you accommodate with the implant?

dbcurtis 19 hours ago||

No. I got it set for distance vision. There are modern implants that are "multi-focal". But they work by spreading out the light, so everything is less bright at any distance. My two pieces of anecdata are: 1. A friend with multi-focal implants says that he needs a very bright light for reading now. Which is one of the reasons I avoided multi-focal. 2. My optometrist got multi-focal, and he noted that it required retraining his brain somewhat, because now instead of accommodation providing focus, focus requires mental attention to the subject of interest.

Cataract implant technology is moving very fast, and my data is about 5 years old, so YMMV.

kroeckx 8 hours ago||

As others have pointed out, the 2nd color is not something I would call either blue or green. Except for the first, it never showed anything I would call blue. So really I have told it the border where I still call something green. So is my green your green?

zkmon 8 hours ago|

Though everyone calls a solid blue color as blue, the actual visual perception or experience of that color could be entirely different. They just grew up calling that experience of their own, as blue color.

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