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Is my blue your blue?

Is my blue your blue?

theogravity

Comments (228)

  • sudobash1
    As other commenters here have noted, I found this interesting but a little frustrating. The second color it asks about is clearly cyan (or turquoise). For me, this is like showing an orange screen and asking if it is red or yellow.I understand that across cultures "orange" does not exist as a distinctly named color (it only got its name in most European languages around the 1500s), but as someone who was trained since preschool that orange is a distinct color, it would feel wrong to "round" it to red or yellow.I haven't had green-cyan-blue drilled into me the same way as red-orange-yellow. So sometimes I do "round" it. I might note how "green" some cyan river water is, or call something cyan "blue" when it is next to something kelly green. But when I just have a screenfull of pure cyan light, I don't know what else to call it.As a side note, I do wonder how differently a child would perceive color if they were taught more than 7 colors in preschool.
  • smokedetector1
    The other week my wife and I were disagreeing over whether a house was green or blue. I was shocked when every passerby we asked agreed with her that it was green. I was absolutely 100% sure it was blue. Turns out according to this site, my boundary is greener than 95% of the population! Funny to see this proved out here!
  • percentcer
    I think the alternative should be "this is not blue". I was served what I would call a "teal" or "turquoise" but the alternative button shows "this is green", which it was not.
  • benleejamin
    I think there's an anchoring effect in play here. If you select blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue -> green…, you land at the population median.(The point being that, once you get to a somewhat ambiguous point (after two blue selections), you can say "oh, well, compared to the last one this is {opposite color}!", and it seems most people do that.)
  • gumby271
    "for you, turquoise is blue." Well no, it's turquoise, that's why we gave it a whole different word.
  • cjbgkagh
    This is like one of those eye tests where they switch between lenses narrowing in on the prescription. The question is really what shades of turquoise is more blue than green.I got 80 which is close enough, I think it’s really only the extremes that are meaningful. I tried simply alternating green-blue etc and got 60. I think adding some randomness and taking more samples (more questions) would help - I was worried that the prior color left a residual effect as a relative comparison was easier than absolute comparison. The extra random samples could help give an idea of confidence in that middle zone.
  • hn_throwaway_99
    I never understood "forced classification" games like this (as an aside, it's also why I always hated Myers Briggs). Maybe it's because I'm somewhere on the spectrum, but it always seems like a dumb, false choice to me.For example, when I saw the second color, "aqua" immediately popped into my mind. Aqua is literally defined as #00FFFF in RGB color space - no red, equal (max) parts blue and green. So it just felt like flipping a coin to me as it felt neither more blue nor more green.
  • seemaze
    This makes no sense. It's like asking: "Alice is in Denver. Is Alice in (a) Canada or (b) Mexico?" - Your boundary between Canada and Mexico is at 40° latitude, more southern than 53% of the population.
  • still_grokking
    This "test" makes no sense. Cyan, and especially turquoise are neither blue nor green, they are a mix (similar to orange between red / yellow).I had actually a very hard time to answer the questions, needed to overlay most of the color with some mostly white / light gray window and only squint at the color around it to decide. In the end my result was 176, which is almost the exact turning point for most people (and that even while my monitor is set to be more cold than default; but like said I had whatever my monitor shows as "white" to compare; even that "white" is likely technically slightly blue-ish).Color perception is anyway much more influenced by contrasts then anything else. (Likely similar to acoustic tones, which are very hard to name / locate absolutely than when comparing to some reference tone.)Besides the things mentioned in the about popup, blue is AFAIK the color we have the most receptors for. So it's imho quite "natural" that most people perceive cyan—which is technically the exact middle—as blue-ish, and of course the color left to it, turquoise, is green-ish (and as it seems, for most people, the mentioned turning point).
  • WesleyJohnson
    I'm sure this isn't an original thought, but I wonder how others see colors. Irrespective of color blindness, is what I know as red appear as blue to someone else? How would you even know or describe it? "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple." And they say, "Yes, exactly." But what they're truly seeing is what YOU know as blue. They see something different than you do, but to them that color has always been called red - even though, if you were to see it as them, it's blue.
  • technothrasher
    Should this be called "Is my monitor's blue your monitor's blue?"
  • ticulatedspline
    72 green though where it drew me on the gradient at the end I definitely would say the line is on green. and the swatch that is says I think would be blue was, well turquoise and not "blue".my path was basically: ok def blue, ok cyan which would be "blue", greenish sea-foam? teal? ok now I wouldn't call these green Or blue . Then kinda bobbled the guesscrappy monitor aside, Feels like there's a combination of factors, some color fatigue from looking at a full screen saturated color and I think some "over thinking" the colors.
  • user3939382
    I think things are green that other people think are grey. Never heard of that with anyone else.
  • Glyptodon
    I don't like this because many of these transition colors I don't really consider blue or green but some sort of blue-green or green-blue.I would also trust the results more if it bounced you around a bit randomly rather than tried to center you in. It gets to a point where I don't really have confidence and I suspect the environment around me contributed a fair amount at that point.Seem to get ~172.
  • kazinator
    The test's gradient does not have even luminence/saturation.It needs to interpolate between blue and green in the CIELAB color space.
  • afandian
    Cool to see this experiment crowdsourced.Guy Deutscher’s “Through the Language Glass” is a very readable history of linguistic relativism, including the long history of this experiment. It even has some colour plates to illustrate. Recommended.https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/412264/through-the-language-...
  • Night_Thastus
    This is also going to be very difficult because:* HDR vs SDR mode* Different monitors have different color replication ranges* Monitor and OS color and brightness controls (brightness affects color perception)* Interior lighting* Monitor technology (LCD, OLED, etc)Meaning even if a color was meant to be X, it just won't appear that way given the combinations above.
  • diziet
    There are colors in between blue and green that are neither blue nor green!
  • gkhartman
    How much does display calibration factor into this? I'm fairly confident it must impact the results, but unsure how much error it would introduce.
  • 0xWTF
    I came back as with a measure of 174 and a label of "true neutral".However, I know enough about perception to know that this called for some hacking.So as soon as I saw the second color I realized I needed to look at something else. So each time after choosing and seeing the next color I looked around quite a bit, inside and through the windows at the outside (I happen to be in a Hawaii, so blues and greens are abundant) before choosing and I noticed significantly different color perception after looking around, specifically, I had more confidence in whether it was blue or green.I can imagine if you just stare at the colors and try to power through, you might get kinda irritated.
  • porphyra
    There's a big cultural component to it, and many languages don't even distinguish blue and green! Also many languages only distinguish them surprisingly recently --- for example, Chinese and Japanese used to use the word 青 which can refer to both blue and green, and even now, the color of the sky in the Republic of China (Taiwanese) flag is referred to by that character.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Sky_with_a_White_Sun
  • hyperpape
    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.
  • MrZander
    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?
  • parpfish
    I've got a color question that I need some opinions on:When I look at the green/blue boundary region on an HSV color wheel like the ones in this S/O thread [0], it appears as a white un-saturated region.If I look at similar layouts in other colorspaces (e.g., something perceptually uniform like Lab) I don't generally see this white patch.My question is: - I'm colorblind. Do other people also see a white patch there? - If this is a genuine problem with HSV, is there an explanation for why there's a hue angle that is unsaruated regardless of S value?[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62531754/how-to-draw-a-h...
  • ozten
    Showing the completion screen and giving the ability to use a slider to pick the center might be more useful.
  • sega_sai
    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.
  • dbcurtis
    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?
  • adxl
    I used to own a house in California which I swore was peach, my coworker told me face it the house is pink.
  • danbmil99
    Dunno if this is a late-in-life thing or I was always like this, but I definitely need more blue to see blue than most (this test put me at 82%, I think that means I'm in the lowest quintile for seeing blue?) Bright blue still looks mighty blue, but when light is dim, I basically see black where most would still see blue.Practical ramifications: * Some of my 'black' shirts are blue when it's sunny * Popular desktop themes (solarized dark) have text that is completely unreadable
  • rendx
    > Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.
  • anon
    undefined
  • lrobinovitch
    This is great!Somewhat similar to a site I made a while ago, but for more "perception boundary" colors: https://theleo.zone/colorcontroversy/
  • drfloyd51
    Some languages don’t make a distinction. And if a language doesn’t have a word for green or blue it won’t have a word for brown or orange either.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
  • dc96
    Noticing on my monitor that it's more blue if I tiptoe and look down, and it's obviously green when looking at below.I think a better way to standardize this without too much variance in color would be make the user denote on the screen where they are actually looking perpendicular to the screen and judge from that area.
  • Insanity
    Would be cool to see a gender distribution. Women perceive more colours than men, wonder how it impacts this.
  • dang
    Related:Is My Blue Your Blue? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41430258 - Sept 2024 (527 comments)
  • jumploops
    Curious how this looks for red/green colorblind folks?Do they see everything beyond the initial green as a shade of blue?--Edit--My red/green colorblind father just got back me with this result:> Your boundary is at hue 175, bluer than 68% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.
  • aidenn0
    Just last week I called something blue and my daughter objected; she said it was green. After discussion we both agreed it was was teal and she said roughly "but teal is a shade of green." To me Teal is a (admittedly greenish) shade of blue.
  • harrall
    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.
  • red75prime
    I forgot that my display is in night mode (reducing blue light intensity). And I ended up with "your boundary is bluer than 98% of the population."
  • nubinetwork
    I must be colourblind, most of those look the same on my phone.
  • HoldOnAMinute
    >> Your boundary is at hue 177, bluer than 76% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.Not really sure how to interpret this. Where is "normal" on the curve?
  • hmokiguess
  • Xcelerate
    My mind was blown once when I heard multiple people calling yellow Gatorade (lemon lime) green. I have no clue how anyone perceives it that way.
  • SamInTheShell
    Showed me teal but only have options for blue and green. Teal ain't either.
  • turtleyacht
    > Your boundary is at hue 181, bluer than 87% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.Pretty sure I accidentally picked blue for a green once.
  • FarmerPotato
    Thanks to the TMS9918, I know cyan when I see it! Years of seeing cyan on a composite monitor where hue is tricky to adjust. My tolerance for the amount of green allowed in cyan is higher. And if it's cyan, it's blue. I see I classified quite a few greenish as cyan therefore blue.
  • caymanjim
    I wouldn't call most of those colors green or blue. Most of them looked identical to me as well. I ended up picking arbitrarily for all but the two I thought were distinctly one or the other.
  • bojo
    While neat, I don't get consistent scores if I retry it a few times. If it leads with a series of greens first, my score is more green oriented, and vice versa.
  • Rapzid
    I don't find this compelling as it seems to me it's well acknowledged there are colors that are BOTH. As in there are colors widely considered to be blue-green. Blue and Green.
  • dekhn
  • jp57
    I have my doubts about the value of a two-alternative forced choice task for this. I was pretty much answering randomly both of the time because I wouldn't ncessarily have called either green or blue.
  • mbo
    I feel like there needs to be some sort of intermediate black screen between the questions, a visual "palette cleanser" if you will. I was actively noticing the saturation of the color decline as I stared at the screen.
  • egonschiele
    Warm blue vs cool blue is another interesting social question: https://www.ducktyped.org/p/a-colorful-controversy
  • nox21125
    >> Your boundary is at hue 173, greener than 57% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.very subtle changes in color after the first two. it also seems to be repeating blue -> green -> blue -> green, for me atleast.
  • coldtea
    If you're not colorblind, yes. More or less.Not much sense for the evolutionary machinery to keep the whole backend the same, but diverge in the perception part.
  • wilj
    This is awesome! I have a slight case of tritanopia in one eye and it was neat to see the difference. My boundary is bluer by 59% in one eye and 87% in the other. It tracks with what I would have expected.
  • D-Machine
    Asinine and meaningless. Forces a classification on something that obviously anyone with fully-functioning colour vision will classify as "aquamarine" or "turquoise" or etc.This has nothing at all to do with colour perception, or, if actual differences in perception are involved, this test fails to distinguish those from individual differences in assignment to linguistic categories.EDIT: To actually test something like this, you need to make an assumption that cannot easily be tested or supported by evidence.E.g. say we could all agree that, generally, blue + orange is a more pleasant pairing than blue + green. One might then imagine a series of images using orange + varying interpolations between blue and green, with the prompt being "is this combination of colours more or less aesthetically pleasing than the last". The average cutpoint could then be interpreted as a subjective judgement of where e.g. teals become "more blue", from an aesthetic / complementary standpoint. But this test does nothing of the sort.
  • jameson
    "teal" is the name for color "Moderate bluish green"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teal
  • cyost
    It looks like this project got forked and updated further https://ismycolor.com/
  • dueltmp_yufsy
    I was always fascinated by this kind of question as a kid. Like I would imagine that everyone had all the colors mixed up and we were each seeing something different.
  • layer8
    This only checks a single brightness level per hue. I bet that two people who agree for those levels might very well disagree at other levels, and vice versa.
  • malbs
    Also no way to account for the variation of LCD displays. The same "colour" can look different on two different panels
  • reassess_blind
    Tried it on two displays, one I’m 82% green, the other I’m 75% blue.
  • iterateoften
    Im left delighted to find out something new, but left wanting to know how to use it.Like if im 75% on the green transition, how do i use this information.
  • cwillu
    For some reason, dragging the window makes the chart re-animate.
  • anon
    undefined
  • stephenlf
    Fun. Are you accepting PRs? I would love to add a “share” button that shares the color I landed on
  • LocalH
    Also needs a button "this is both" for colors like cyan
  • timnetworks
    > Your boundary is at hue 172, greener than 63% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.isn't turquoise exactly (50%) between the two?
  • tjwebbnorfolk
    After 4 clicks, I can no longer decide whether it is green or blue. I would pick "neither" if it were offered
  • OwlGoesHoot
    Man doesn’t understand teal the website
  • nektro
    > Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.
  • anyfoo
    Wow. Did anyone else have some serious trouble with this?The first color was obvious to me, as it was designed to be (it even tells you if you intentionally misclick). But at the very next color, the first "test color", I literally face palmed and said "oh my god" out loudly.It was so, so hard for me to decide. I really just wanted to pick a non-existent "teal" option. Both "blue" or "green" felt wrong and equally right at the same time.It just got harder from there. At the end, it told me that my threshold is "bluer than 80% of the population", but honestly, I don't think that's really true in my case. I was so ambivalent, my choices really felt random to me very quickly.
  • softbuilder
    I want this but for blue vs. purple.
  • freecodyx
    cyan is neither blue nor green
  • andai
    Pro tip, I had my device's blue light filter enabled.I want to say that shifted my score a lot. But every time I play I get a pretty different score, even on the same screen calibration. So, uh...
  • wat10000
    I wonder how much of this is testing people's eyes/brains, and how much is testing their screens.
  • zuminator
    When the final threshold image was displayed, I felt that the boundary was too far over to the left and I had a fair amount of green on the blue side.I think this would work better if the hues jumped around a bit instead of blatantly triangulating, so that you wouldn't be biased by your prior semection.
  • foxes
    I just took it to mean is this more blue or green rather than literally blue or green. Correct answer is then 180, anything else is clearly a fail :)
  • ece
    I got hue 175 twice, but bluer than 66% of the population once and 59% the second time.
  • anon
    undefined
  • u8080
    Midori
  • antisthenes
    This assumes that the person you're testing isn't aware of the whole category of colors that sit between green and blue?There's teal, cyan, aquamarine, etc...It's such a uniquely american notion to force someone to categorize something (incorrectly) into one of 2 things. Almost a comical parallel to the political system.
  • moffkalast
    This is cyan!
  • nicebyte
    it's a neat experiment but I think it's ultimately flawed because color is usually perceived in context, and depending on context I could easily see anyone reinterpreting the hues they labeled "green" in this test as blue, and vice versa.EDIT: in general, blue is a pretty fascinating color. yes, many cultures have a somewhat blurry distinction between blue and green. Some others seem to differentiate shades of blue that others don't (i.e. in Russian "голубой" and "синий" refer to distinct colors but in English those would be just shades of blue). I guess there's something about photons in that energy band that messes with perception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-photo_blue