Is my blue your blue?

133•theogravity•1h ago

Comments

smokedetector1•47m ago

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!

rnewme•33m ago

Same situation happened to me, and I have same test result as you.

VadimPR•28m ago

I had the same discussion with the color of a river in Albania with my wife. The test says my boundary is a bluer than 85% of the pop - sounds about right!

bitexploder•25m ago

I am bluer than 78%. Colors. How do they work.

strangegecko•4m ago

I'm bluer than 98% apparently. For me, turquoise is green. I didn't realize that's not normal.

If I'm off on a detail like that, then...uh oh.

gobdovan•22m ago

You've got the blues.

makr17•12m ago

In the sitcom Mad About You there is an episode where Jamie tells Paul to put on a tie. Specifies the "navy blue one". "I don't own a navy tie." "Yes you do, it's the one that you think is dark green."

My wife and I go round and round about what is and isn't blue and/or green.

percentcer•45m ago

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.

StilesCrisis•41m ago

I totally agree with you but it defeats the purpose of the site. It got to an obviously cyan color and I couldn't answer either way (it's not blue or green) so I closed it.

jedmeyers•32m ago

Same here, it's often neither blue nor green, so this experiment is pointless.

SunshineTheCat•32m ago

100%. It's like being asked is this black or white and being shown 50% grey.

reactordev•26m ago

That’s the point of this. To find out where in that spectrum your vision lands, not to get a perfect score.

xmprt•17m ago

OP's point is that this isn't valid because neither of the answers are correct. If you're really trying to measure a spectrum then the answers should allow for fuzziness. That is, you have a range/confidence interval of where green ends and where blue starts and in between is neither/both.

reactordev•8m ago

correctness is not the point. binary choice is the whole point. because my blue may not be your blue...

miltonlost•25m ago

Yeah, but is the gray to you more look more black or more white? That's the point.

cubefox•16m ago

It's like being asked whether yellow is more green or red. But it's different. You can't get yellow just from alpha blending green and red. You need additive color mixing.

Black and white are different. You can get grey just from blending them.

MattGaiser•24m ago

That is the point of the exercise though. Is 50% really where you draw the line?

mort96•18m ago

But the point is, there is no line which separates white and black (or green and blue). 50% grey is neither black nor white, it's grey. Turquoise is neither green nor blue, it's turquoise.

miltonlost•13m ago

but when does turquoise start and end and green starts and blue ends? or is there just another color there between them. And then what about that color?

JasonSage•12m ago

I see it as having a blue component and a green component. If the mixture has more green than blue, then it's green.

The analogous version in black and white is "is this dark grey or light grey?" because that's the one asking you to guess which side of the 50/50 split the color is on.

airstrike•4m ago

[delayed]

AntiUSAbah•30m ago

Thats the exact point of this experiment to define the inbetween and move it to either green or blue.

matt_kantor•13m ago

I interpreted the buttons to mean "this is bluer than it is green" and "this is greener than it is blue".

HoldOnAMinute•41m ago

>> 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?

rationalist•35m ago

The About section at the end said most people average around 175.

dbcurtis•31m ago

It seems to me there is a broad range of "normal", as in well within the standard spec sheet tolerances for humans. It is more about what is average or median.

diziet•40m ago

There are colors in between blue and green that are neither blue nor green!

lokar•32m ago

Any system of giving names to hues will necessarily use ranges.

I think the intent here is clear in context.

lrobinovitch•37m ago

This is great!

Somewhat similar to a site I made a while ago, but for more "perception boundary" colors: https://theleo.zone/colorcontroversy/

nubinetwork•36m ago

I must be colourblind, most of those look the same on my phone.

QuantumNomad_•30m ago

Same. There were like three different colors at first and then the remainder looked mostly the same.

Also, I wonder how the results are affected by my screen and environment. I’m on an iPhone in a dark room, with brightness turned all the way down and I currently have TrueTone enabled and Night Shift enabled.

I was bluer than x percent of the median. Night Shift mode reduces blue light exposure. At daytime with Night Shift off, I would surely be seeing the boundary earlier, as there would be more blue light transmitted by my screen.

I may have to repeat the attempt multiple times on different screens and lighting conditions (both indoors annd outside) and see if the results vary wildly or not. I think they will.

dbcurtis•35m 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•34m ago

Can you accommodate with the implant?

dbcurtis•25m 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.

afandian•35m ago

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-...

technothrasher•34m ago

Should this be called "Is my monitor's blue your monitor's blue?"

hermitShell•30m ago

Exactly, and how bright is your display compared to your surroundings at time of viewing?

yieldcrv•30m ago

followed by the number of rods and cones in your eyes, as well as their own sensitivity, as well as your language

rootusrootus•23m ago

And what if you are wearing blue blocker readers? I am, and perhaps unsurprisingly my result was greener than average.

ETA: But of course when I retook the test without my glasses, I went even greener.

hyperpape•34m 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•24m 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.

benleejamin•34m ago

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.)

make3•26m ago

it's a binary search, not too surprising. search over a unidimensional ordered space

layer8•13m ago

That doesn’t explain why I landed 92% off the population median.

djmips•9m ago

My boundary was hue 188, bluer than 98% of the population, for me turquoise is green and then it shows an overall chart which I have to agree with so no, I don't agree with your assessment. I often get into blue/green arguments with my children and that's when I started to suspect that it was personal opinion.

timnetworks•33m ago

> 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?

chao-•26m ago

The "exact 50%", or the boundary between green and blue, is nominally hue 180, which is cyan. A search for the RGB, CMYK and HSL for turquoise yielded a few hue values from 171 to 174 (depending who you trust, and allowing for a bit of drift due to colorspace conversions). In any case, 171, 172, 173, and 174 are all on the green side of cyan.

gkhartman•32m ago

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.

AntiUSAbah•28m ago

I always wanted to have a color calibrator and a few years back i bought one.

all my displays were so well defined out of the box, it wasnot worth it at all. Like you would need to use this particular profile for proper real industry printers to even have any benefit of it if even because all my displays were well calibrated.

I would argue that this would only make sense for highly profesional graphics designer and i don't think this experiment requires this level of granularity.

swiftcoder•14m ago

A lot of the color calibration obsession was from back when panels shipped with truly awful factory calibration. A quick perusal of rtings suggests that most manufacturers try and pre-calibrate their panels these days

rendx•32m ago

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

MrZander•31m 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?

nicebyte•30m ago

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

seemaze•29m ago

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.

phaedrus•23m ago

Someone should make a parody site asking whether shades of yellow are red or violet.

miltonlost•22m ago

Your example would only be valid if "blue" and "green" had objective answers for when something is Blue and something is Green and have clear demarcated boundaries. You're switching to a literal boundary example where there are actual lines to be crossed. Colors are a fuzzy continuum; national boundaries, not including fought-over areas like the Sea of Japan, are easy to be in or not.

wat10000•29m ago

I wonder how much of this is testing people's eyes/brains, and how much is testing their screens.

dang•29m ago

Is My Blue Your Blue? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41430258 - Sept 2024 (527 comments)

sega_sai•29m 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.

VadimPR•27m ago

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

keane•25m ago

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

rootusrootus•24m 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?”

shagie•24m 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.

layer8•10m 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 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 “warm” colors are warm because we associate them with warm things.

nox21125•28m ago

>> 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.

jameson•26m ago

"teal" is the name for color "Moderate bluish green"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teal

chao-•24m ago

Yes, and since Teal is Cyan with 50% Value, you will often also see people use Cyan to refer to the boundary color between Blue and Green.

nektro•26m ago

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

tjwebbnorfolk•22m ago

After 4 clicks, I can no longer decide whether it is green or blue. I would pick "neither" if it were offered

egonschiele•22m ago

Warm blue vs cool blue is another interesting social question: https://www.ducktyped.org/p/a-colorful-controversy

wilj•21m ago

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.

dueltmp_yufsy•20m ago

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.

red75prime•20m ago

I forgot that my display was in night mode (reducing blue light intensity). And I ended up with "your boundary is bluer than 98% of the population."

moffkalast•20m ago

This is cyan!

layer8•15m ago

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.

harrall•14m 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.

zuminator•13m ago

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.

iterateoften•10m ago

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.

glial•8m ago

Send it to a significant other, then discuss your differences. Will provide you with a new in-joke.

mbo•9m ago

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.

porphyra•4m ago

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

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Comments

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