Dress Color Experiment

The original photograph of the dress The dress was a 2015 online viral phenomenon centred on a photograph of a dress. Viewers disagreed on whether the dress was blue and black, or white and gold. The phenomenon revealed differences in human colour perception and became the subject of scientific investigations into neuroscience and vision science.

The phenomenon originated in a photograph of a. We surveyed color descriptions for the dress embedded two scenes with different simulated lighting conditions (image 2 and 3 described above; N = 1127, 1047 from the main experiment and 53 from the in-laboratory controlled experiment) (Figure S2). Illumination assumptions account for individual differences in the perceptual interpretation of a profoundly ambiguous stimulus in the color domain:"The dress".

Journal of Vision, 17 (4), 5. Rather than seeing the color of the dress itself as either white or blue with gold or black trim, the participants reported seeing a spectrum of shades from light blue to dark blue, with yellow. Further, although inferred illumination chromaticity in the image explains variation in the color matches to the dress (confirming the color constancy hypothesis), color constancy thresholds obtained using an established illumination discrimination task are not related to dress color perception.

Blue and black or white and gold? A decade later, it turns out the ultra. The dress, a viral phenomenon from 2015, sparked widespread debate over its colors, with viewers claiming it was either blue and black or white and gold. A total of 19 subjects in the experiment saw the dress as black and blue, and 17 saw it as white and gold (Rabin, 2016).

The experiment itself comprised of subjects being primed by a white screen on a 22′ ipad and then being shown the picture of the dress. PICK A COLOR In one of the first experiments with The Dress, Bosco Tjan of the University of Southern California and his colleagues asked students to match the blues and golds in the photograph. Remember the infamous debate about "the dress"? Whether you saw it as blue/black or white/gold, it all comes down to the way your brain perceives color.

A vision scientist explains.