I suspect it tests your monitor and monitor calibration as much as your color perception. In particular, sRGB displays have a pretty severely limited green gamut. If you have a wide-gamut display, the test is probably gonna appear different.
But another problem is with displaying the colors essentially full-window, which is going to be nearly-full-screen for many users. When we're staring at a screen with a particular tint, our eyes quickly do "auto white balance" that skews the results. It's the mechanism behind a bunch of optical illusions.
To address that last problem, I think the color display area should be much smaller, or you should be shown all hues at once and asked to position a cut-off point.
Author here, yes, it tests a mix of your monitor calibration and colour naming. The two types of inferences you can make with this are:
1. If two people take the test with the same device, in the same lighting (e.g. in the same room), their relative thresholds should be fairly stable.
2. If you average over large populations, you can estimate population thresholds, marginalizing over monitor calibrations.
The most interesting thing for me is that while cyan (#00ffff) is nominally halfway between blue and green, most people's thresholds, averaged over monitor calibrations, imply that cyan is classified as blue. I was not expecting that the median threshold (hue 174) would be so deep into the greens.
I got hue 174 as my threshold and really I just wanted to say "neither, this is turquoise/teal" for most of the questions. But blue/green was the only option.
I got hue 175. It's interesting to note that some older cultures, Japan for example, didn't always have separate words for blue and green, both were the same color ("ao" in Japanese). You can see the effects of this even today with things like traffic lights in Japan, which are considered "green" by their standards but blue by many others' standards.
There are also other cultures, such as Russia, where light blue / dark blue (simplification) are effectively considered separate colors.
All this to say, personally, I think we will continue to evolve to recognize more distinct "colors" such as teal, which is neither blue nor green but somewhere between. A lot of this recognition power is rooted in linguistics and culture, it's not as strictly biological as one might think.
Thanks for this comment! I dabble in fountain pens a bit, and one of my favorite inks is "ao" by Taccia.
Now it all makes sense (tho, to my eye it's kind of a blurple–royal blue; I get no green or teal from it. But, now I'm tempted to go do a blotter of it and look at it extra carefully in natural light.)
In Russian light blue is “blue” and dark blue is “indigo” essentially. It still has seven colors in the rainbow. It’s just that in English colloquially nobody uses indigo.
Yes, well that's what I mean. Culturally, Russians think and speak about colors differently, dividing them up differently than the West.
> Russian does not have a single word referring to the whole range of colors denoted by the English term "blue". Instead, it traditionally treats light blue (голубой, goluboy) as a separate color independent from plain or dark blue (синий, siniy), with all seven "basic" colors of the spectrum (red–orange–yellow–green–голубой/goluboy (sky blue, light azure, but does not equal cyan)–синий/siniy ("true" deep blue, like synthetic ultramarine)–violet) while in English the light blues like azure and cyan are considered mere shades of "blue" and not different colors.
> Blue: plava (indicates any blue) and modra; in the eastern speaking areas modra indicates dark blue, in some of the western areas it may indicate any blue
I am not deeply knowledgeable on Russian, I failed Russian in high school, just going off of my surface-level knowledge of linguistic relativity regarding color, and discussions with a friend from that part of the world, so I might not know what I'm talking about here.
That’s a bit complicated. The difference between синий and голубой is not really a difference in hue, it’s a difference in brightness.
It tends to be true that hues tending towards green are perceived more brightly than hues tending towards red, which means that blues with more green in them are more likely to be голубой, but by virtue of the fact they are perceived to be brighter.
But in principle, the line is drawn horizontally on the colour chart (or at least diagonally), not vertically.
The color name question here doesn't have a clear answer because most of the respondents would call this "teal", "blue–green", "turqoise", "cyan", "aqua", or some similar name. You'd get somewhat similar results asking whether an orange (the fruit) is really "red" or "yellow", or whether an eggplant is really "blue" or "red".
An individual person's answers on this kind of question are likely to vary from day to day, are context dependent (i.e. whether one object or another appears more "green" or "blue" depends on what kind of object it is), and colors this intense are very sensitive to changes in eye adaptation and technical details of the display and software, as well as inter-observer metamerism.
So in addition to the color naming difficulties, it's not even a very good test of color naming, if you want to get reliable psychometric/linguistic data.
For a single individual, all of the above is true, but for a large enough sample size, the answers may be more generally useful because you account for all of those rounding errors.
No, because if my case holds more genera (and I suspect it does), the answers are in part out of sheer frustration, and therefore prone to being similar to the last one given.
I didn't exactly rage quit but did think it was silly.
I wouldn't describe teal as blue or green any more than I'd describe purple as red or blue, so being forced to pick felt silly. Like being forced to choose my seventh favorite Norwegian glacier - technically its a valid question but my answer is necessarily going to be arbitrary.
That’s like asking which way a Necker cube is oriented. It’s both and neither. For blue and green, there’s a range of shades for which that ambiguity is true and you can “flip” it in your mind.
I would actually find it more practical to determine the thresholds on both sides where I find it to become ambiguous.
Not as far as I can tell. The phrasing of the question test does not acknowledge such ambiguity to start with, and by forcing them to answer one way or the other the test does not allow the users to signal perceived ambiguity even if they wanted to.
So how could the point of this exercise possibly be to find the range of ambiguity?
Fun, I got 174 and when I saw the results my reaction was "but that is not turquoise!" which I suppose means I either don't know what turquoise is, or my screen has bad calibration/gamut.
I don't think those specs make a difference. You would need a wide gamut display and a hardware calibrator to be sure you were looking at the colour as it should be
That wasn't clearly part of the test. To be ultra-pedantic (this is HN after all), the user's choices don't say "This is more-blue-than-green" and "This is more-green-than-blue". The choices are only "This is green" and "This is blue" forcing you to just pick one, where there is no clearly correct choice. When the color on the screen is neither green nor blue, many people will just pick a random answer.
I bet if the choices actually said "This is more green than blue" the results would be different.
On such a random internet doodad most users will pick a random answer period. To see what this thingy tries to do without wasting any time on it. I hope it doesn't try to do gather any meaningful data.
Personally I "tried" to answer truthfully at first and then went absolutely "ok f u, don't care no more" when it showed turquoise :D
Taking how you behave, and extrapolating that it to everyone, (and furthermore being unable to accept that other people might behave differently), is not a winning strategy for life.
According to conversion rates and engagement metrics of most apps I've seen (not even mentioning social media where 2-3% engagement is the norm) most users are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Unless said app is a work/hobby tool, but that shouldn't be really called engagement.
Turqoise doesn't feel either more-green-than-blue or more-blue-than-green. It feels neither blue nor green, and I don't see any way to compare it to either.
It's clearly more turqoise than blue. Or green.
Turqoise on a computer monitor is always missing part of itself, so maybe I should've answered based on that, but I don't think the computer monitor was the point.
180 and blue and I suspect that language also plays a part (I was brought up in an environment where the word turquoise starts with green, but now live in a turquoise-producing state where the finished product look far blue-r.)
it looks like my default is if there is 40% green in that it is green. Thus it told me that turquoise for me is green. Which if I look at Turquoise the RGB color, that is green. If I look at Turquoise the mineral about half the time it is green and half the time blue.
Logically, a color, green etc., is a 'simple' notion and cannot be explained terms of anything simpler. With color we have to revert to a different description, here wavelength. But wavelength is not human perception (and we can't explain such perception in simpler terms).
(Yes in New York and Indiana, no in Massachusetts, and the law is silent elsewhere. Personally I believe that because the torta exists, the burrito may have some characteristics of a sandwich but should be considered a wrap)
I'd love a last step in the test where you're presented with the gradient, but before showing the distribution and the user's score. Allow the user to select where they consider their threshold, then display the final results.
A sorting interface would be another neat step! And yeah, I think most would gravitate toward the middle. Seeing how "far off" you are would be fun :)
Ooh maybe have the user slide a gradient left and right inside a window, aligning the center of the window with where they think the line is between blue and green (i.e., instruct the user to fill the window with equal amounts of green and blue).
It tells me to rotate my device, implying it should work on my phone, but I can't figure out how to move the colors. Holding and sliding doesn't work. Tapping doesn't seem to do anything.
> The most interesting thing for me is that while cyan (#00ffff) is nominally halfway between blue and green, most people's thresholds, averaged over monitor calibrations, imply that cyan is classified as blue.
Perceptually (that is, in CIE-LCh color space, for example), the hue component of #00ffff is a lot cloer to #00ff00 than it is to #0000ff. But the website doesn't ask which color is closer, it asks if it's "green" or "blue". And how we use those words has more to do with culture than with perception. We also call the color of a clear afternoon sky "blue", even though that is perceptually extremely far away from #0000ff.
> while cyan (#00ffff) is nominally halfway between blue and green, most people's thresholds, averaged over monitor calibrations, imply that cyan is classified as blue
Yes, because (at least for me) the thought went "well that's cyan, it's not really blue but if forced to pick, cyan is more like blue so I'll click that". It's like rounding up at 0.5.
>For me, if forced to pick between two choices that were not correct, I'd just pick one randomly. I think this is a wording problem more than anything.
That's what I'd do if I were being paid to take the survey. Instead I just closed the window as soon as it popped up cyan and only gave me blue and green as options.
But, before digital color displays became popular, the average person had, by far, mostly exposure to subtractive (paint) colors.
US school children are taught from birth that the primary subtractive colors are red, yellow, and blue, simply because those words are easier to pronounce, and so magenta is a weird "red" and cyan is a weird "blue" , until the children discover on their own, or in specialized print/paint schools, red and blue are not primary subtractive colors.
Humans are terrible at naming things.
And to bring it back to Current Thing:
Google AI cites this source for its red/yellow/blue claim, even though explicitly this source says that Google gives the wrong answer.
I mean, I was taught in grade school that George Washington cut down a cherry tree and then said he couldn't tell a lie. That didn't make it true.
I would hope that here on HN, people are aware of RGB primaries, and then maybe CMYK. Saying that cyan is "not primary or secondary" is just wrong. Even Wikipedia explains in the first paragraph that the RYB model has a "lack of scientific basis":
By the way, "cyan" is a very poor name to use for #00ffff. The term "cyan" refers to the kind of slightly greenish blue used in 4-color printing (CMYK), and was just a Greek word for "blue" chosen to be a jargon word to avoid confusion with the English color name. It has a totally different color than the equal mixture of typical G and B primaries in a computer display.
Similarly, "magenta" is a poor name to use for #ff00ff. The term "magenta" is a jargon word for the slightly purplish printer's red, which was chosen to avoid confusion with the English word "red". It has a completely different than the equal mix of RGB R and B primaries.
("Red", "green", and "blue" are also very poor names for the RGB primaries, which are substantially orangish red, yellowish green, and purplish blue.)
OP have you considered doing a version for this to test contemporary Greek native speakers, vs others ("control" group),
for differentiation of blues?
I remember reading that modern Greek has two color-names for sky- and dark- blue (not sure what the prototypes are for each nor if they have hue components, maybe the "sky" blue is green-shifted?)... always been fascinated by the discussion of "weak Sapir-Whorf" around this and would be quite interested to see if there are any differences in discrimination...
The classic cognitive/perceptual psyche data to gather would be time-to-discriminate, with the prediction being that Greek speakers make faster judgement because they have higher/faster discrimination, than others.
Not sure how you'd pose the question to non-Greek speakers tho :)
I checked in at hue 174, the median, which is interesting to me as I know that my wife will test to a very different hue as we have occasional disagreements on whether something is 'blue' or 'green' :)
It is interesting to test people at just one device.
I used my phone on a mount, and completed the test with my wife, children and myself - I was interested (though not surprised) what an outlier I was, as I am colour blind in various combinations, but though my wife scored 'bang in the middle' - it was interesting that wasn't common.
My kids were both to the left of the scale fwiw - I was further right than 98% of people.
> 2. If you average over large populations, you can estimate population thresholds, marginalizing over monitor calibrations.
This might be one case where it might make sense to cluster between the reported operating system. At the moment I only have a family of Macs to test, but I can imagine that Windows users with their different default gamma get back different results.
> I was not expecting that the median threshold (hue 174) would be so deep into the greens.
You're not asking gender of the test taker. Your results will be skewed because you're probably getting more men than women. Women in general have more ability to detect green vs blue.
Even more fundamentally, red-green colorblindness is a recessive trait on the X chromosome, thereby affecting biological males in far greater number than females.
It could be a high enough percentage to make the results from this site noticeably different between the sexes.
Not that surprising. To most people, pure RGB-blue looks a bit violet. People are used to ink (subtractive) blue more than light (additive) blue. People call the sky blue and water blue; both are closer to cyan. Most people think of a neutral blue as something like #0080ff.
I classified cyan as green because, well, it's greener than pure blue, and it's also the most greener you can get than blue, in RGB space, without losing any blue :)
>most people's thresholds, averaged over monitor calibrations, imply that cyan is classified as blue.
I think that's just to your test forcing people to pick either blue or green even though cyan is both, they are just going to pick blue because it's the first option and more likely to be picked randomly.
Color vision theory is far too complicated to discuss here, and I'm not going to debate cyan as a mixed color of blue and green wavelengths versus a fixed wavelength that's in between both of them.
What the author provided was, at best, misleading but nonsense as far as science is concerned.
If the author said he was an artist and presented colors as a preferential list it would have been a different matter.
BTW, I don't mind being voted down (it happens to me regularly), but here those who did are only showing their ignorance. I'd add the author—who penned here—ought to explain his actions in much more detail.
Not to be mean, but I think every assertion in your comment is wrong.
Blue and Green are English words which sometimes describe primary or secondary colors additive colors. Cyan is (an English word that describes) a primary subtractive color.
Colors are not English words. They're physical reactions inside our eye-brain systems, affected by varying wavelengths of light. (Actually that's not the most accurate description of color either, but it's a more useful model.)
Not necessarily because the ambient light would affect the screen shows (it's emissive, not reflective) but because the brain also does "auto white/colour balance".
For a fun experiment, get your hand on some heavily yellow-tinted party glasses, go outside on a clear day with a bright blue sky.
When you put them on everything will be stark yellow tinged (and the blue sky will be completely off, like green or pink, can't recall which) but after a little while going on your business, perception adjusts and only a much less dramatic yellowish veil is in effect. You'd look at the sky and see almost-blue.
The kicker is when you remove the glasses: the sky will suddenly be of a glorious pink! (or green, can't recall) Only moments later it'll adjust back to be blue.
A certain wavelength may be absolute blue of a certain kind, but the perceptual system is all relative: "wait, I know this sky should be blue because that's what I've always seen, so let's compensate".
The same kind of effect - although less dramatic - can be achieved with lights that can be adjusted from say 2400K to 6500K and having as reference an object that is known "pure white", like a A4/letter sheet of paper.
This effect, in turn, adjusts how "absolutely displayed" colours are identified by way of biasing the whole perceptive system. AIUI that's the rationale behind Apple's True Tone thingy, aiming to compensate for that.
So the result of this test should be somewhat different depending on ambient lighting temperature.
Digital cameras also do automatic white balance (between yellow and blue) to mimic the automatic white balance of our eye/brain. If cameras didn't do white balance, outdoor photos with sunlight during noon would look extremely blueish, or indoor photos with artificial light would look extremely yellowish.
I like this illustration of how strong our natural white balance is:
During some heavy dust clouds from nearby wildfires, the sky was a deep and unsettling yellow. However, I couldn’t get a picture of it, because the automatic color balance removed the yellow overcast altogether.
The same problem occurs with photographing the yellow sky when dust from a Sahara sandstorm (presumably coming across the strait of Gibraltar) blows over Europe every few years. But you can set the white balance manually in the camera.
> AIUI that's the rationale behind Apple's True Tone thingy, aiming to compensate for that.
No idea what "AUIU" is, but yes, generally displays should do automatic white balance like iPhones do. I don't know why most Android phones don't seem to do it (pretty sure mine doesn't), and generally TVs/monitors also don't do it. (The required color temperature sensor can't be that expensive?)
> I don't know why most Android phones don't seem to do it (pretty sure mine doesn't), and generally TVs/monitors also don't do it.
The rageguy one would say either patents or "whoa the colors really pop I want that shut up here's my $$$" uncancellable LOOKATMEIAMTHESHINY mall mode, but via Occam'r razor I think mostly because they (manufacturers) simply don't care (about consumers, or about making a good product at all)
TVs/monitors (or laptops even, and more phones that you'd believe) with just a simple auto-brightness are stupendously rare even though Apple does it since forever and a half ago.
Yeah, laptops and TVs not even doing automatic brightness is even more absurd. Though Android phones have automatic brightness since forever, so why do many not have automatic color temperature (white balance)? The color temperature sensor can't be much more expensive than a brightness sensor. It's logically just an RGB brightness sensor.
Android does have a night mode which changes the white balance of the screen at sunset and sunrise, but this is just a binary thing and doesn't respond to actual ambient light.
At least I know that cartoon. But generally people strongly overestimate how many people know various abbreviations. For years I didn't care to look up what "IANAL" means. I since have forgotten it again.
Also deliberate software blue light filters. Mine is always on, both on the desktop and on the phone. Many people may forget that they are even using one.
This is pretty much the same way that a calibrator works (if you have ever watched a color calibrator running, you know what I mean), but a calibrator doesn't get biased, like the human eye.
In order for it to be a true "neutral" test, each test would need to be preceded by a "palate-cleanser" gray screen, or something, and there would probably need to be a neutral border.
> you should be shown all hues at once and asked to position a cut-off point.
This is actually the way I have seen this stuff tested, before.
These sorts of tests also need to be done in controlled background lighting. Whether people are doing this in a dark room, in a sunny kitchen, or under green led lighting would be a greater factor than anything being tested.
>> These sorts of tests also need to be done in controlled background lighting. Whether people are doing this in a dark room, in a sunny kitchen, or under green led lighting would be a greater factor than anything being tested.
Whether its a dark room or sunny kitchen, i'm not sure whether Turquoise is ever going to be blue or green. The entire question seems more like wordplay.
I don't think that's necessary for an informal test. Human color perception is extremely good at compensating for that and modern screens are relatively uniform and uniform besides. Cultural differences like the person downthread saying they consider anything with the slightest hint of green to be "green" seem far more impactful.
I tried it twice, once on each of my two different monitors (a Dell S2817Q and Dell S2409W) made a few years apart and with completely different settings; and I got 175 on one and 174 on the other. So pretty close even given the difference.
Parent was a joke about the Costco fixed price hotdog.
UK Costco hotdogs are £1.50, which is not equal to $1.50, reflecting both its arbitrary nature and that UK purchasing power is weaker than the exchange rate would appear. (Computer books are a frequent offender here of having the same $ and £ prices)
That might be a language issue. In Danish it's common to use "turkis blå", i.e. turquoise blue. Then again, you can also use "turkis grøn", turquoise green.
Within the ISCC–NBS System of Color Designation Turqoise (#40E0D0) is classified as a brilliant bluish green. Turquoise blue (#00FFEF) is close to turquoise on the color wheel, but slightly more blue.
> To address that last problem, I think the color display area should be much smaller, or you should be shown all hues at once and asked to position a cut-off point.
If you're doing this on a phone, try holding your phone at arm's length and against a white background (such as the wall or ceiling) and doing the test that way. Assuming you have redshift/night mode disabled, I suspect you'll end up closer to the median.
> I suspect it tests your monitor and monitor calibration as much as your color perception. In particular, sRGB displays have a pretty severely limited green gamut. If you have a wide-gamut display, the test is probably gonna appear different.
I was initially running the test with redshift enabled and was getting 95% towards blue. After reading this comment, went and disabled the redshift and got a consistent 50% median.
I only realized after seeing your comment. As usual, when I turned it off to compare, the hue it shifted to looked super unnatural and I had to re-enable it.
I always forget how much white-balancing my vision does.
I did it on IPS laptop display and got 175. On my OLED phone I got 179. I am more in agreement with the phone results, but the turquoise on the phone looked even greener to me.
I think this is flawed. You quickly end up on a color that's clearly not "blue" or "green" and you're unlikely to keep hitting "this is green" several times in a row, conceding that ok, fine, maybe this is blue, whatever. You're basically measuring how many times people are willing to click the same button in a row.
Edit: Possible improvements: changing the wording to "this is MORE green" and "this is MORE blue" and randomizing the order in which they are shown, somehow. I realize you're just doing some kind of binary search, narrowing the color range.
This is not to mention color calibration of your monitor, or your eyes adjusting / fatiguing to the bold color over time...
The order is randomized. Hit reset and you'll get a different sequence. The sequence is also adaptive (not a binary search---it's hitting specific points of the tail of a sigmoid in a logistic regression it's building as you go along). Try it a few times and you'll see how reproducible it is for you.
It of course depends on the calibration of your monitor. One of the reasons I did this project is I wanted to see if there were systematic differences in color names and balance in the wild, for example, by device type (desktop vs. Android vs. iPhone), time of day (night mode), country (Sapir-Whorf), etc.
The sequence itself should be converging however, right? I feel that there should be some random jumps outside of the current confidence interval so that contextual aspects can be filtered out or at least recognized.
Yes, exactly this. Because it seems to be converging right now, I quickly get the feeling that there's no meaningful choice, after the first three prompts you end up with something that's neither green nor blue. Re-taking the test gave me a very different score.
It might work better for me to do some contrastive questioning: show a definite green followed by an intermediary color, then a definite blue followed by an intermediate color.
The whole point of asserting where your border between green and blue is, is to ask about colors that are in between the two. It doesn't make sense to ask is RGB(0,0,255) blue to you? Well, unless you are color blind it is.
Of course, that's clear as day; the idea is to reset your presumptions from the previous trial and sample the ambiguous colors in a more consistent way, by priming you from the extreme ends of the green/blue scale.
It is common practice in psychometrics to use two levels in a forced choice and model responses as a logistic regression, which is what's done here. Adding an N/A option turns the thing into an ordered logistic regression with unknown levels, which is tricky to fit, but it's possible. Having done a lot of psychophysics, having more options generally doesn't make the task easier.
Sounds like psychometrics is unsuitable for modeling this problem, according to what you're saying. When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.
The way that XKCD did it is the best, you ask people to give a name to each color then the responses are entirely natural and unprompted.
I don’t think that forced choice can give accurate results if a substantial number of people perceive green and blue as being non-adjacent - i.e. there exists a color between green and blue (turquoise/cyan/teal).
Otherwise it’s like asking people whether a color is red or yellow, when it’s clearly a shade of orange.
Are you sure that it is common practice for a problem that has three valid answers A, B and C, to only allow people to answer A or C?
Your website is not talking about "levels" of colour.
It's asking "is this blue or green", not "is this closer to blue or closer to green".
The question (1) "is this blue or green" has three valid answers: blue, green or neither.
The question (2) "is this closer to blue or green" only has two valid answers.
I would assume that with these types of surveys, the first thing to do is to qualify the proper categorization of the question.
Sorry to say, but to me it seems that almost all of the confusion in the discussion here is because you're asking question (1) (which has three valid answers) but expecting an answer from (2) (which indeed has two valid answers).
But teal isn't a single point, it's a range. You can have teals that are more blue or more green than each other; they can't all be zero. Whichever one you choose to be the true transition point between blue and green, there will be teals that are more blue or green than that one.
Then by that framing, the test is asking you to decide what hue value is the "zero" between the positive/negative blue/green. Is the wording imperfect? Sure, but the intent was still entirely clear.
Saying it’s a subrange implies you can perceive differences in tone within it. In which case, reframe the question as “is this shade of teal closer to the blue or green end of the subrange” if you like.
Maybe if I'm given two colors inside that range, I can say which is bluer and which is greener.
Given just one color, I simply cannot say that it's green or blue, or even if it's more green than blue or vice versa.
I stopped at the 3rd or 4th come because I couldn't give a honest answer. That makes the test useless.
I can't complete it with correct answers, and if I give incorrect answers, the conclusion is useless.
It's a well know fact that people are unable to distinguish colours that are too close together.
You could even have a smooth gradient from colour 'a' through colour 'b' to colour 'c', where it's possible to distinguish 'a' from 'c' but not to distinguish 'b' from either 'a' or 'c'.
I think the main point of this test was to determine the position of teal in your case, as your definition of teal is the midpoint(-ish range) between blue and green. (For me it's more blue though.)
I mean, a good test would be able to detect that neither-blue-nor-green range and approximate midpoint as well, and it should be fair to say the midpoint is indeed the threshold between blue and green. (I don't think the current version of test can do this, though.)
I actually checked that at the end of the test (when it shows the gradient image with the response overlay).
There were two distinct points, one for blue and one for green, where my mind would place the transition to the colour in between.
(And yes, on one end it's bluer and on the other end greener, but (much like a shade of orange is neither red nor yellow) the colours are still not either green or blue.)
No, I'm saying that the sliver of a chasm between the colour in isolate, and what I subconsciously imagine the midpoint to be, is so damned thin that were I to look at the colours side by side, I could not distinguish one from t'other.
And (even if I could) a bluish teal would no more be a blue than a reddish orange a red.
It's not about how an RGB monitor produces the color, it's about how it's perceived. #00ffff ("Cyan" or "Aqua" [1]) looks bluer to me than green, while #008080 ("Teal") looks significantly greener, despite both colors using equal amounts of blue and green in RGB.
I definitely have the bias you mention. In my case I don't think it's mainly due to not wanting to push the same button many times in a row, but because I compare with the previous color, so if previously I was already somewhat unsure but I chose green and now it became slightly bluer, it "must" be blue, right?
I think I can get over it, but it requires conscious effort and even then, who knows. Bias is often unconscious.
Another possible improvement would be to alternate the binary search colors with some randomly-generated hues. Even if those answers are outright ignored, and the process becomes longer, I think they would help to alleviate that bias. At least you wouldn't be directly comparing to the previous color.
VFX engineer here. Yes we used to cailbrate monitors and work in the dark.
However one of the key people that built our colour pipeline was also colour blind, so its not actually a requirement, so long as you use the right tools.
Most people aren't that sensitive to colour, especially if its out of context. a minority of people aren't that good at relative chromaticity as well (as in is this colour bluer/greener/redder than that one) But a lot of people are.
Language affects how you perceive colour as well.
But to say the experiment is flawed I think misses the nuance, which is capturing how people see colour _in the real world_. Sure some people will have truetone on, or some other daily colour balance fiddling. But thats still how people see the world as it is, rather than in isolation.
I once worked for a company that had a designer who was color blind. He would always show up wearing the exact same outfit every day: turns out that he was REALLY color blind, and so he just gave up and bought 7 long sleeved shirts and 7 pants, all black. Didn't work out so well for him in the designs... most companies don't want monochrome websites.
Likewise. I think for me there's quite a wide band of colours in the middle that I consider to be "neither/either", so I'm basically just picking a random answer for those.
A modified version of the test that finds two boundaries (green/neither/blue) could be interesting.
Or maybe it just needs to take more samples, in a more random order.
Same. Some of them are neither obviously blue nor obviously green, so what the test was measuring for me was what I was thinking about at the time, the decision I'd previously made, whether my mouse was currently hovering over "blue" or "green", etc.
>I think this is flawed. You quickly end up on a color that's clearly not "blue" or "green" and you're unlikely to keep hitting "this is green" several times in a row, conceding that ok, fine, maybe this is blue, whatever.
I agree with you, the whole thing is flawed when it could be better. When you ask the question "is my blue your blue?", you are evoking the old philosophical question, and it's a question about color perception, not words. This test did not test color perception, it tested "what word do you use?"
I think of blue as a pure color, and green as a wide range of colors all the way to yellow, to me another pure color. so if there's any green at all in it, I'm going to call it green. (maybe it's left over from kindergarten blending "primary colors". also, while I like green grass, I don't like green as a color, so any green I see is a likely to make me think, ew, green) But in terms of what I see, I can only assume I'm seeing the same thing as everybody else is because the test is not testing it. Just because I call something green doesn't mean I don't see all the blue in it.
>Edit: Possible improvements: changing the wording to "this is MORE green" and "this is MORE blue" and randomizing the order in which they are shown, somehow. I realize you're just doing some kind of binary search, narrowing the color range.
yes, the test should show you pure blue, then a turquoise mix, then pure green, and a ... etc. It should also retest you on things you already answered to measure where you are consistent.
I do think that the philosophical question could potentially be approachable in a modern context;
Show people a colour and map their brain activity - the level of similarity between two people's colour perceptions should be reflected by similarities in the activity.
The philosophical question is not dealing with the objective external reality;
It's a question of subjective experience - and that experience should be reflected in electrical activity.
Given the fact that the broad structure of the brain is largely shared across members of the species, similar stimulation should trigger similar activity in the same regions of the brain.
If the same colour triggers markedly different activities, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that the subjective experiences are not the same.
Except that’s literally not how humans are wired or develop - even nerve paths and other fine grained details in our bodies show significant divergence, and there are major macro level differences readily apparent even based on gender, color blindness, etc.
Honestly, it would be shocking if it were even a little true beyond ‘frontal cortex’ levels of granularity. And even then, Phineas Gage type situations make it clear that may not actually be required either.
And that means completely different individual activity can trigger similar subjective experiences as much as similar activity can trigger different subjective experiences, no?
If that were the case then there's no way that they'd be able to extract images from people's neural activity, and yet they've started doing that very thing.
No real need for the snark; if we dismiss the notion of human divinity and look at ourselves as broadly fixed macro-structure computational machines (like any other broadly deterministic machine) similar signals propagating over the same sets of sub-computers will generally (accepting the undetectable, such as steganographically hidden homomorphic compute contexts) be reflective of similar underlying operations.
If I were to imagine a warrior, and his general perception of the colour red, I may find the way his brain processes the colour more closely to a rival warrior than his wife the gardener.
A real world example; London taxi drivers and bus drivers show distinct patterns of changes to the hippocampus.
The way that the mapping data is stored will be heavily bias towards being spatially reflective of the real world counterpart.
Note the bias will be towards a degree structural isomorphism, one internal 2D + 1T spatiotemporal surface map of the city might be a rotation and/or reprioritisation of another - but they will have a shared basis (convergent compute simulations of biased subsets of the same real world structures), and when navigating from point A to point B, the path and nature(though not the propagation vector) of the electrical activity of both will be reflection of the same real-world surface map.
Now I say spatiotemporal - because the driver going from A to B in the morning will develop different expectations of the levels of traffic at different parts of the journey.
Agreed. It would be more accurate to show the final gradient (without the curve) and let people choose where is the boundary. It wasn't even clear what the actual task is
iNymbus is a tech company that offers automated solution for financial operations, helping finance teams work more efficiently and Data-driven decisions.
Because the second color I saw was somewhat like turquoise and the site is called 'Is My Blue Your Blue,' I decided that everything that you say yes to colors would be blue and everything else would be green. I never saw a green until the result was displayed :D
* I can't know your monitor's calibration, your ambient light, or your phone's brightness. Obviously, this will affect the results. However, I am tracking local time of day and device type, from which we should be able to infer whether night mode and default calibration has any aggregate effects. Anecdotally, thus far, I haven't found any effects of Android vs. iPhone (N=34,000).
* The order is randomized. Where you start from can influence the outcome, but methodologically it's better to randomize so the aggregate results average over starting point. You can run the test several times to see how reliable this is for you.
* It's common practice in psychophysics to use two alternatives rather than three (e.g. blue, green, something in the middle). It would be a fun extension, which you can handle with an ordered logistic regression. The code is open if you want to take a shot at it: https://github.com/patrickmineault/ismyblue
* I am aware of most of the limitations of this test. I have run psychophysics experiments in a lab on calibrated CRTs during my PhD in visual neuroscience. *This is just entertainment*. I did this project to see if I could make a fun webapp in Vue.js using Claude Sonnet, and later cursor, given that I am not highly proficient in modern webdev. A secondary point was to engage people in vision science and get them to talk and think about perception and language. I think it worked!
My partner and I regularly disagree on blue vs green as the colours become more of a gray colour - might be interesting to randomise the brightness of the colours being displayed then seeing if the skew towards people perceiving blue Vs green changes as the colours become closer to gray.
I also often disagree on blue vs purple, which is inconvenient when we name the same coat two different colors.
I think my "blue" is a way more specific shade than most people (hue 192 here, whatever that means on an uncalibrated display). Likewise, I'll usually say "purple" before others.
My partner and I were well aware of the limitations, but it has clearly demonstrated our difference in perceptions in a way we were both happy with. Being able to see where your partner lands relative to you is deeply satisfying.
It was fun but I messed up the statistics! I had Redshift running, which (maybe you know) makes the colors more reddish. And I got a bluer than 98% of the population result. Turning off Redshift ... makes me instead greener than bluer.
I would guess the hackernews crowd has a higher percent of bluefilter installs since that is a very common topic. Probably also more agressive settings for the blue filter.
When done on my Xperia cell phone, even a small shift in screen orientation made the green leaners into obviously blue. Might be worthwhile capturing phone position if you can.
I stopped at the first one I could not call blue or green.
If I were to call it blue or green, it would not only not be reflecting what I think, but I could not guarantee that if I'm show the exact same color again, that I will go the same way. So I felt there was no point in continuing.
This is a problem in the method; there needs to be a third choice, so that the user can always answer (at least if the test color is always in the blue-green gamut).
It could work with two choices if the user were instructed to randomly choose in the event of indecision. I mean, truly randomly, like by means of a fair coin toss. But that could just be implemented for them by a third button. That button could then just record their indecision rather than randomly choose between blue and green, so you have better data.
Without a third choice, or properly randomized behavior, you have bias problems. For instance, a certain user who likes the blue color might always say blue when not able to decide. Another one might always go for green. Yet, those two users might exactly coincide in what they unmistakably call blue, green and what triggers hesitation/indecision.
(I realize that no matter how many bins we have, there are boundary indecisions, like not being able to decide between green and blue-green. What range constitutes indecision is also subjective.)
That exactly is the point of the test though.
Not to test whether most people call 100% blue blue, or 100% green green.
It is to test at which point of the "inbetween" colors people switch from blue to green or vice versa.
It forces you to decide whether the color you see is "more blue" or "more green", since after all they're all just a mix of blue and green.
Well for me, personally, blue and green are simply not adjacent, so there's no point where green turns to blue without going through an intermediate color. This might well be due to my extreme exposure to computer colors, where the in-between color is usually called cyan, or sometimes teal or aqua. When I see cyan, I cannot sincerely say that it looks “more blue” or “more green” to me, any more than an orange tastes “more apple” or “more banana”.
Light can absolutely be more blue or more green in an objective sense. Either it is closer to blue on the spectrum or it's closer to green. It doesn't matter if you have intermediate categories in between.
To poke a whole in your analogy, a more apt comparison would be to a gradient of sweetness, where one can indeed describe a flavor as "more sweet" or "less sweet" relative to apples and bananas.
The whole point of the test on this website is to judge subjective color perception, so I'm gonna go out on a limb and say you missed the point of my comment.
I suspect that if you were shown two blue-green colors side by side, with nothing between them, you could look at the boundary and tell which side contains more blue.
You can estimate that if you can determine at which point the color becomes too ambiguous to call blue on one side, or green on the other. Different people will have a different range. If you want to identify a threshold, you can take the midpoint of the range.
Either of these approaches may be bad. The third paragraph of this page explains why:
My suggested approach might not be much better though; it still relies on presenting a single stimulus.
It's not clear how the two-alternative forced choice can be used to find someone's blue-green threshold.
I think a better experiment would be to show the user gradients and ask them to move a bar to where they think is the midpoint in the blue-green transition. Subsequent gradients center on the user's previously identified midpoint, but zoom in more.
There is also this question: by which path do we interpolate from blue to green?
Let's imagine the CIELAB color space. Say that our pure green lies on the red-green axis, all the way on the green end. Blue lies on the extreme of blue-yellow. Do we interpolate through these linearly or what? And using what luminance value?
I suspect that for every given, fixed luminance value, the blue-green boundary is a contour. There are many paths we can take between blue and green, and along each path there is a boundary point. If we join those points we get this contour. Then if we do that for different luminance values, the contour becomes a 3D surface in the color space.
I'm red/green colourblind, so this was interesting to compare my green against my blue.
The thing I find being colourblind is that I value colour less than shade. Colour signals, even when I can tell them apart, are just less important to me than to non-colourblind people.
I most recently noticed this playing Valheim with my wife. There are red mushrooms in the game, surrounded by green foliage. I noticed that I have trouble spotting them, even though I have no problem seeing that they are red and the foliage is green. To her, the mushrooms stand out as being very visually different from the background and immediately noticeable. To me, they just aren't that distinct and get quite hard to spot.
So while I got the green/blue distinction to within 80% of the population, despite my shitty colour perception, it just didn't matter. At some point in the process I got to "I really don't care. I would ignore the signal that any further difference in colour is sending".
As you can guess, I have fascinating talks with designers and artists, to whom the differences really matter. I understand that colour is really important to them. I just don't see it.
I am also red/green colorblind and so I cannot tell if graphs using colours in many articles (more than not) is so shitty for everyone else or not, but choosing no distinct colours (that I have no trouble differentiating) on thin lines is defying the purpose (understanding) I believe. Even if I had no trouble with colours (being close to darker shades of brown) I would perhaps use thicker lines and variate the style of the lines. So the information screams out. Putting similar shade colours on graph with colour legend in the corner telling which thin line means what is just something I throw away mentally being so difficult to navigate.
I've got normal color vision, and it's bad for me too. If there's more than about a half dozen lines on a graph, chances are two of them are going to be so close together that it's a pain to figure out which is which. Visually distinguishing information in graphs can be a very tricky problem, but at the same time, people could easily do a much better job at it if they tried.
Interesting. Red next to green creates a different kind of contrast. It looks like its glowing (vibrant border), the same way our eyes perceive something very close compared to something far away. That is just my observation, I'm not sure If there is some scientific evidence for that.
I have normal color vision, and color just doesn’t matter to me (I can never remember the colors of things, and distinction by color doesn’t help me much). I’m not discounting your theory, but I think there must be a little more to it.
Not the person you're responding to, but also colorblind and I strongly relate to what they're expressing. It's different than not being able to remember colors. I can see (most) differences, but I need to actively focus on seeing to do it. For example, one CI system uses red/green stoplight emojis for test status. A given run might have 50-100 of them. Trying to see which ones are red means actively looking at each individual status and thinking "what color is that?" because my brain simply doesn't register reds as "jumping out" in the sea of green.
>For example, one CI system uses red/green stoplight emojis for test status. A given run might have 50-100 of them. Trying to see which ones are red means actively looking at each individual status and thinking "what color is that?" because my brain simply doesn't register reds as "jumping out" in the sea of green.
Fellow CVD person here, I have that same problem at work. That and when there are up/down arrows and whether up or down is good changes based on the metric and they use color to let you know. They all look samey unless I actually stare at them for a while and the color difference sorta bubbles up.
It's so annoying too because it'd be trivial to use different signals instead of color, but no one cares about the 1/12 of us that are colorblind. It's crazy that the ADA doesn't recognize CVD as needing accommodation when it's far more common than most other disabilities.
I don't think it's that no-one cares. We're a large enough segment of the population that they do, kinda, care.
It's that they don't understand. I've had designers ask me if I can tell two colours apart, and then say "ok, cool, so we can use those colours because we tested them on a colourblind person" without getting the point that I still won't notice the difference. They don't understand that colour just isn't a strong signal to me.
For someone with strong colour vision, which designers tend to have, colour is a huge signal. It's immediately obvious and carries meaning to them. In the range of design tools available to them, colour is high on the list. Being told they can't use it because 1/12 of us won't notice is hard for them to understand and feels arbitrary. I get it.
Yes! I've had some lengthy discussions with UI designers trying to get them to understand this exact point. I can see that they're red and green, I just don't notice that they're red and green.
Interesting, does playing a lot of games with a toddler asking them to distinguish between colors reduces the chance that they have your type of colourblindness? Since you can see the individual colors but need to concentrate on them, I wonder if playing such games make the child learn to notice the colors?
Like the other person said, most forms of colorblindness is caused by genetics--specifically, recessive traits. So, it's the sort of trait that will run in the family.
To help explain our experience, it's like trying to distinguish between two similar shades of yellow. It'll be clear and obvious that both are the color yellow. When there's only one example of each standing next to each other, it'll be easy to tell which shade is the lighter one, even if it's only slightly different. But if you had a sea of examples and are asked to pick out which yellows are slightly lighter than the other ones, then it might cause you to stop and study them for awhile to figure it out.
It's just like that for the common forms of colorblindness (where the color cones in the eyes are bent, but not missing), but instead of this metaphorical "yellow" it's this special "red-and-green" color that we see that's different from what everyone else sees. It's like trying to distinguish between two different shades of the same color, where it's obvious which is which when there's only two examples to compare to but not so much when your entire field of vision has bits of one hidden amongst a sea of the other. It's like red and green are a spectrum of the same color rather than being two separate ones.
Mine is genetic, inherited from my maternal grandfather.
My mother was an artist, spent ages testing my colour range with a set of Pantone colour swatches, just out of curiosity rather than as an attempt to cure it. That's how I know I see shade better than colour - she would show me two swatches that differed slightly in colour and then two that differed only in shade (or shade/tone/tint to be accurate). I could tell the shade differences apart better than the colour differences.
So I'm not sure that early training would help. But it couldn't hurt
I got 174 ('true neutral') by choosing 'blue' or 'not blue'. The 'green' here looks to me like a light yellowy-orange. The color that I have learned to associate with unripe bananas.
I got "Your boundary is at hue 167, greener than 86% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue". I think I consider darker and yellower colours as green - for instance tennis balls are firmly green to me, but a lot of people say they're yellow.
I wonder if this has anything to do with your upbringing. I grew up on a farm in a dry part of Australia, where the grass didn't often get very green. Most of the year it was yellow. If you associate green with grass and the grass is yellow, maybe you associate green with a yellower colour?
It's very cultural. For example, Japan used the same word for green and blue, so their green light on traffic lights is as blue as possible while conforming to international standards for the light to be "green".
I think this might be a bit overblown. "why do we call it blue signal?" is a common 3-5 years old question in Japan.
Old Japanese traffic signals had blue tinted lenses, like ultramarine blue. Those lenses were used in conjunction with warm yellow incandescent lamps, technology available at the time. Deep blue + warm yellow = green.
Over time the green color must have normalized, without laws and slogans not reflecting that. And nowadays they're green LEDs.
The blue-green distinction is something that tends to come late in most or maybe all language families. Ancient Greek also used the same word for blue and green. As I recall, the first color words a language gains are black and white, followed by red. Blue-green is one of the last distinctions made.
This has begun to happen in the UK as well, and I'm struggling to get anyone else to see it. Traffic lights installed in the past couple of years seem to use a new style of LED that emits a turquoise light instead of green. I took a picture and looked at the RGB value and the G/B were equal. Everyone else I ask says they still look green. Here's an example: https://static.independent.co.uk/2022/04/22/00/21135757-1ac1...
In all rulebooks, lights are red-yellow-green, but in many places, I can see red-amber-turquoise. Now a sure way to get a traffic police officer livid is to call the yellow light “amber” or “orange”…
My friend got a "Running an Amber" ticket when we were teens outside metro Detroit, MI. I had never heard it called that color before but that small memory is always on my mind when the light changes as I'm crossing.
In the UK, the yellow light is officially an "amber" light in terms of driver regulations and statutes, such that some anally retentive type is always bound to correct anyone who dares say "yellow".
I got a very high "green" threshold too - 95% averaged across three runs, since my first result seemed surprisingly high.
It's funny though - I feel like I'm less likely to go green on the other direction too. I'd probably say a tennis ball is right on the line, and seems more yellow than green to me too.
Maybe I'm some sort of green gatekeeper, and I don't want to dilute my personal definition with lesser greens. Green is my favorite color, I'd say, so maybe that's something to do with it.
Yes, and I'd like to see a breakdown of the answers per country.
I'm French and my boundary is at 167 apparently (though I have a poor screen and depending on where I look, I could say that even further towards the green side is still blue). But a regular occurrence at home is my wife (who speaks a different language, we don't live in France) talking about « the green table » while I'm trying hard to find any green table around us, until I realize she's talking about that turquoise table that I call the blue table. Also happens on the red/pink and pink/purple boundaries.
I've taken the test multiple times, and ended up with my boundary being both greener than >70% of the population and bluer than >70% of the population in separate attempts. And I know my color perception to be good at distinguishing hue - it's just that I don't have strong opinions about categorizing it in this space.
I'm pretty sure there's some hysteresis going on - if we randomly end up in the ambiguous zone on the bluer side, we'll be pressing "blue" every time a small change happens, because it's basically the same color. Until the changes add up so much that we're out of the ambiguous zone on the green side - and now our "border" is far on the green side. But if we started on the other side, entering the ambiguous zone from the green side, it'd take a big cumulative change before we press "blue".
This is a classic problem of trying to choose a single label for anything.
There are very few absolutes… maybe none.
I like this test applied to an apple. . With no bites taken, is it an apple? (Of course) Now take a bite. Still an apple? (Most would say yes). Keep taking bites until it is just a core, or an even just a seed. Then?
Maybe my favorite is just the boundary of one of us humans. Where is the boundary between me and not me? Obviously it’s on the outer edge of my skin. But zoom in a lot, and you have this blue/green binary fit problem.
Fundamentally, reality is a continuum of variation, and the categories and ontologies we define are just models that are useful for reconcile reality to our own cognitive capacities, rather than anything objectively true of the external world.
The example we see every day in traffic lights. In most parts of the world we’d unambiguously call it a “green” light, despite the fact they’re almost always cyan, with the blue component (apparently) helping drivers with red/green color-blindness.
Yes, that's the point of the test, to see how you perceive the ambiguous ones. That is, at the end it shows the chart with the left 50% is green and right 50% is blue. The turquoise in the middle is what is hard to tell if green (aka on the left 50% or blue aka on the right 50%). For many the result line isn't down the middle but more to the left or right, and thus shows if you see turquoise (the ambiguous colors) more as blue or green. The text at the bottom of the test should put the answer in words/numbers.
Since cyan means 50% green and 50% blue, other than exactly in the middle of the chart, all the colors shown are either to the left of cyan(the middle), or to the right. So all the colors are either slightly to a lot blue or slightly to a lot green. This test is testing where everyone middle essentially is. If there were as cyan/turqouise option, that would be a very different test, I imagine essentially testing to lines, where the line between blue and cyan/ambiguity begins and the line between green and cyan/ambiguity begins requiring I imagine several more questions to get that answer and would only then be showing two lines on the graph, vs this test which is able to say if you lean more to the right or left of the middle of blue to green.
Sorry do you mean in general, if I went to a paint store and they showed me a cyan patch? It would depend on that particular shade of cyan if it was more green or blue, and then on top of that my eyes bias towards green/blue. Or are you asking for the results of my own test here which show my particular bias of turquoise (as the author refers to or cyan as you refer to)? Took the test a couple types and varies but for me say I see turquoise as green (though close to 50%, so if took a few more times imagine may land blue sometimes and/or depend on if I'm viewing in a dark room or light room.
Sorry not sure I understand. Yes, with each color that appears the I (or any user) has to pick which color they see more of, blue or green. Since every color shown unless presumably exactly 50% between green and blue, will either be more blue or more green. So you/I/users have to pick if they see more green or blue. The person next to you might see a hint of blue and you may see a hint of green for the same color since our eyes all work differently. UPDATE-Oh you may have been asking that of the person I was replying to initially.
Human language is precise. Equal parts green and blue is the technical definition of cyan. Why are you imposing an erroneously calibrated device upon the whole of human language? Cyan doesn't stop being cyan just because your monitor is broken.
> Someone forgot to check a physics textbook before sewing a flag, which isn’t exactly a shocker.
Why does the author find it necessary to mock "scientific accuracy at Gay Pride parades"? Especially when the point of the article is that 7 is no more "scientifically accurate" than the gay 6?
I think it's in very poor taste to suggest that to be gay is to be scientifically inaccurate.
Yeah, I shouldn't've linked to the National Post, someone forgot to check a history textbook before publishing that article, which isn't exactly a shocker.
The original rainbow flag from Gilbert Baker had 8 symbolic colors.
>Surprisingly in some languages such as in my mother tongue "Pastho" : we have the same one single word for Blue and Green. let's call it blue.
The history of language is like that, early on a population would have one word for both and then eventually distinguish a line between blue and green and then later start getting more specific shades from there.
This is great! What I would love is a way to compare myself with someone else though. I'm French and my wife is American, we have a lot of disagreement about colors (neither of us have vision deficiencies, we have ruled that out).
I like that the test refresh your eyes with a random noise. But I think it should be a bit longer. My eyes still have a bit residue from previous color.
The mask is 200 ms long, which is a bit on the long side compared to most psychophysics experiments. I can try to crank it up to 300 ms, but beyond that I think it'll start feeling slow.
Neat website, and lovely to use. I wonder if the test needs to be slightly more sophisticated?
My results seem to depend on whether the starting colour is blue or green. If it starts with blue I will categorise more of the turquoise as blue, and if it starts as green I will categorise more of it as green.
It felt really odd for me to have to choose one or the other because my language has a name for that intermediate color between blue and green (also applies to any light blue, like that of the sky) but English doesn't.
edit: actually, English does have a name for it, cyan
The About pages notes that this was built with Claude Sonnet 3.5. Nice to see these real-world LLM uses where people who aren't front-end developers can share cool things.
By chance, I was reading earlier today about the dilemma of recreating 'Tyrian purple', aka 'Royal purple', since knowledge of making (something like) it from sea snails was lost long ago (long before it was 'created in the lab' by Perkin in 1850s, igniting the German aniline industry). And the old faded art works (back when it was high fashion) are not so reliable either.
The Wiki sez [0] that in 1998 the process was thought to have been discovered (who can be sure?) "True Tyrian purple, like most high-chroma pigments, cannot be accurately rendered on a standard RGB computer monitor" and shows 2 quite different swatches.
But... this reminds me of an issue many years ago when i worked in a design agency. A client's marketing manager had been sent printed samples with spot colours for sign off. She was complaining about the colours not being correct...
It turns out that someone in her team had taken photos of the printed items and emailed them to her because she was on the move. The correctly printed items were photographed in bad light with a camera phone, maybe it was an iPhone 3G around that time... which were then compressed and sent on email, and she was then comparing them on a poor quality PC laptop display...
Sadly she wasn't the only one to raise a similar issue. Another guy was notorious for zooming in on 72dpi low quality images and complaining that the logo wasn't legible or sharp enough :D
Omg! A perfect time to share my story from before[1], where I lost a notebook at a big box store, and I had early on lumped the notebook in with greens, and thus described it as a "green notebook".
But some people, including the store employee that took my call, strongly felt it was clearly on the blue side and claimed not to have anything matching that description I only ever recovered it by going there in person and asking to see it.
(Fortunately, it had my name in it as a second check.)
> Your boundary is at hue 171, greener than 72% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.
Of course there is a monitor and eyes component/biais tonthe measurement, but I also think this reveals something cultural. In France we call this color "bleu turquoise" so "turquoise" is not a color per se but a qualifier for the color blue.
Interestingly, at some point in the test I really had a hard time choosing between green and blue and precisely thought "it's a perfect turquoise so just between the two, how to choose?" so I closed my eyes and looked at it again and decided… green for this one! I wouldn't have expected the final result it gave me!
I just found this in the "about" section of the website:
> In early experiments, we found that people's responses cluster around 175, which coincidentally is the same as the named HTML color turquoise. This is interesting, because the nominal boundary between blue and green is at 180, the named HTML color cyan. That means most people's boundaries are shifted toward saying that cyan is blue.
That last sentence surprises me. At least in French, cyan is also considered a shade of blue. For turquoise I can understand that people would call turquoise green, but isn't cyan blue for everyone?
Is there a specific reason you didn't just have a list of a dozen or so colors and shuffle the array when the app starts? Just curious about the reasoning behind this and the value it provides.
This is great and surprisingly consistent. Apparently I’m in the 98th percentile of how blue my cutoff is. I wonder if this is related to my favorite color being green (I’m perceiving more things as green because I like the color)
Maybe that's because of much I learned about about color, but I very quickly get to a point where the correct answer can only be 50% blue, 50% green. Answering either blue or green feels wrong to me.
I'm deuteroanomalous, and I got 165 - greener than 94%. Turquoise is blue (well yeah, it always has been!). People often tell me things are green that clearly are not, so I'm wondering what this means. Does the "165, which is greener..." thing mean that I only say it's green when other people would say "very green"?
I'm red-green colorblind but I surprisingly got a perfectly median result. I'm usually horrible at determining what is green but I think the blue/green distinction is less prone to issues with red-green colorblind people.
There's a few 'kinds' of red-green colorblind as I understand it. It has to do with whether you're missing a type of cone, or whether the frequency response of a cone type is shifted. I knew someone who had never experienced what others call "green" - all things supposed to be green are brown. I on the other hand see some green things, but a lot of things other people call green are brown, maroon or even purple. Pastels are the worst.
I have mild tritanomaly ("blue-yellow colorblindness"), which _directly_ affects blue vs green color discrimination, and I landed at 168, "greener than 85% of the population"
It gets complicated if the goal is perfect accuracy. Cone sensitivity also varies on an individual basis even for color-normal people. Worse, the transfer function of the eyeball also varies with age as your lens yellows and internal fluid clouds a bit. Even holding those constant, brains do a lot of processing that maps what your eyes can physically capture into perceived colors, which are significantly influenced by upbringing.
Plus, screens and ambient lighting. It's a lot of variables.
When you hit submit, we store your responses anonymously so we can aggregate them later and measure aggregate naming curves. We don't store any information that would identify you personally. "
Watch the results getting skewed in real time as night falls across the Americas and more people’s phone enter the mode with more yellow for low light conditions…
The site records local time of day when you hit submit so I can track whether this has any effect. I have 7,000 answers thus far, I should have enough by tomorrow to determine whether there are any systematic effects.
I'm actually of the opinion, that blue-green colors like teal or turquoise are both green and blue at the same time. Basically a mixture.
Having to pick just exclusively one - blue OR green - for such colors just feels, wrong and arbitrary?
You could also make a website that shows various shades of purple - and ask people is it blue or red? Well, both! Purple is a mixture of both blue and red. Why treat teal differently than purple?
"For you turquoise is blue" - no, for me turquoise is turquoise, but you did give me that as an option. Multiple times I thought to myself "I would not call this color blue or green, it is some variety of blue-green". So in my opinion that makes this whole test kind of nonsensical.
I did this test multiple times and I get a mix of both extreme results. I think my vote of green or blue on the current color largely depends on the previously displayed color.
E.g. If the previous color was a strong green, I’m more inclined to see a color between green and blue, bluer than it actually is.
I used to have a lot of anxiety wondering if what my brain perceived as "Blue" was the same shade of "Blue" to other people. Like, sure, the sky is blue and a similar color to water for everyone.... but what if what I see as blue is actually red for other people and there is just no way to confirm because that is how our brain processes that frequency of light? I'm sure it isn't actually possible to confirm... but I was always interested in it.
Ultimately it doesn't matter. Your "blue" is just a translation of that frequency to some distinguishable impression to allow you to see. But it's a good bet that the same wiring that went into your brain making that translation also went into other brains.
Is the data collected by this open? Would absolutely love to take a peek/contribute to analyzing it
(I'm trying to do similar experiments like this myself and I think it would be great if the data is published and we can like, reproduce each other's work/explore variants etc)
I assume that would defeat the purpose, since turquoise is blue and green. And while for most the more initial more obvious blue or greens are easier, when close to the middle of in between blue and green (aka turquoise), that's where it can get confusing, and this test helps to show if your perception leans more towards blue or green and by how much.
Then maybe allow non binary choice. Like 0.7 green / 0.3 blue.
Becase when I see a mix of blue and green and there is only two buttons, I choose green. Or maybe I should treat the buttons as "> 0.5 green" and "> 0.5 blue".
Imho violet vs purple are difficult to distinguis (classify), maybe they can add a page for that too. These two colors are not spectral neighbors, so may be more interesting.
One more note - modern RGB displays do not produce real turquoise, just combinations of G and B. Are RGB(0,1,10) and RGB(0,10,100) on the same position of the scale between green and blue? On the final diagram, how is the horisontal axis computed?
> Becase when I see a mix of blue and green and there is only two buttons, I choose green.
If you choose green, because you see a slight more tint of green than blue, yes, that's what you should do for this particular test. Just as you should choose blue if you see slightly more blue. For many when close to the middle hard to tell since have to go with your eyes and gut. But if anytime you are unsure if blue or green, if you always choose green regardless, then the test presumably wouldn't provide accurate results.
> Or maybe I should treat the buttons as "> 0.5 green" and "> 0.5 blue".
Yes, with each color they show, it's asking you if you see green (aka more green than blue) or blue (aka more blue than green). With the test starting off easier and then shades much closer to the middle (either left or right of the middle) where much harder to tell without a color picker, and everyone's eyes will be different and close to the middle you will probably see most as either blue or green.
> Then maybe allow non binary choice. Like 0.7 green / 0.3 blue. Becase when I see a mix of blue and green and there is only two buttons, I choose green.
And (as far as I understand), this bias is what the test is supposed to detect.
I read somewhere that cultures that have more words for shades of blues and greens, have brains that are objectively better at identifying minute differences in the shades.
I've never said 'teal' out loud in my life and I'm useless at it, but greeks get top marks for eg
English itself has dozens of words for snow, so I wouldn't be surprised if Inuit languages did too. In fact I'd be shocked if they didn't have complex ways of describing something so important.
Ohhhh this is soo cool!
I always wondered if my color perception is normal because sometimes i have the feeling that i do not have that much of saturation.
Still failed to find such a test but this goes into this direction.
Maybe this comment can help me with this search.
A related quiz that might be interesting: fill the screen with random grid of colors, all close to BLUE and tell user to pick "blue". See how close people recognize 0x0000FF.
I clicked "This is blue" whenever a green came up and "This is green" whenever it showed me a blue. Interestingly it didn't bother with any turquoises or cyans when I did this, it only showed me unambiguous blues and greens.
At the end it told me "Your boundary is at hue 180, bluer than 85% of the population. For you, turquoise is green." Which I would've thought was impossible to discern from my choices.
Furthermore, there's some randomness to this. If I click only "This is blue" the hue boundary is different each time, in the end result. The lowest I got was "hue 134, greener than 100% of the population".
Same for clicking only "This is green", with the highest observed boundary as "hue 226, bluer than 100% of the population".
The websites shows a slope from green to blue across turquoise, but al most of this is almost certainly calibration error, and people being forced to say blue or green when they want to say turquoise.
The true graph is most probably a very small slope on the green and blue ends, and rectangle of measurement error in the middle. The "you are 70% greener" conclusion is a textbook example of false precision that ruins the science.
So at the end, I'm shown a full-screen gradient from green to blue, with a line showing where my personal boundary between green and blue lies.
Except that when I look at that gradient, it seems to me that the actual transition lies much further to the left, roughly in the middle of the screen: i.e., I'm being told that I consider a significant range of colours to be green that, on this final page, appear to me to be quite clearly blue.
Will vary a lot based on just window position and size... I got a very different score from the window fullscreen/centered vs off to the lower right when I first did it. My work monitor is not great, to say the least... will try on my personal display later.
Towards the middle, I don't really see it as blue or green, but kind of accept that it's towards the middle. Half randomly selecting really.
I remember being in school and thinking that "what if my (color) is your (other color)" was a cool question, and then later I think I reasoned out that color is measurable so the actual color is objective, and the differences between different people is just like... rods and cones that are somehow different between people aka partial colorblindness.
I'm green red colorblind my result is "Your boundary is at hue 197, bluer than 99% of the population. For you, turquoise is green". I suppose that's because my cones don't detect green fully (without getting into the anatomic details of colorblindness).
You should consider colorblind people aswell, this will make the results more interesting.
You have a meta header that sets a strong blue theme-color on the top of the browser. I feel like this might be biasing the results on iOS Safari because, compared to this blue, turquoise appears comparatively green.
Edit: it looks like the theme-color is meant to stay stuck as whatever the initial green/blue colour was. But for me, it shows as white if the initial choice is green.
If you do this in a fullscreen browser on a widescreen monitor, your peripheral vision will also come into play. You'll be able to see that the edges of the monitor are slightly different color than the center, because peripheral vision is less good at seeing color.
When I shrunk the monitor down to a narrower window, I was getting more consistent results than otherwise.
I'm doing it over and over again and getting different results each time, though the results seem to cluster around 174. I think part of the problem is that the response is primed by whatever you responded most recently, which means the final answer will tend toward (or away from?) whichever colour was shown first. (Might just be a me problem.)
If you guess the obvious wrong answer the choices between green and blue become more and more obvious. If you continue to guess wrong you end up with a boundary hue of 179 or 180 (bluer than 85% of the population). How is this possible? I'd suspect someone making the choices here would be colorblind and well into the 99.9th percentile.
Lol, I have protanomaly. The second color they show is one that I perceive as light gray, and my only options are saying that it looks blue, that it looks green, or to reset. I reset. Now it lets me see three colors I can distinguish until I get a series of greys (I'm just clicking to see it through to the end).
Interesting. Does anyone else see a band of green in their blue? My boundary is at 170. Greener than 85% of the population. This point looks like the transition between blue and green to me, to the right I can see the gradient go to blue then to green again, then back to blue. So there's a green band in the middle of my screen.
I don't see the point in this is blue/green, when most languages have a name for the color that is between them. Pretending that teal, aka blue-green, aka cyan, etc, isn't a thing doesn't seem that useful if you are trying for a consensus. They should be asking, is this more green than blue or neither.
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Can you help me make a website called is my blue your blue? I want to make a website that is in vue.js that allows one to determine the boundary between their perception of blue vs. green. It should use a golden ratio search to find the midpoint between blue and green. It should have the color be the color of the background, and it should have two buttons, blue and green. If they pick green, you should show something bluer, and vice versa.
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It offered a starter with vue and tailwind, then I asked to add a supabase backend. I took maybe 5 hours to get the original version, which I tweaked until I got about 800 initial responses so I could show a population curve. Later I modded it with cursor to add an about section, fit a proper GLM rather than a simple golden ratio estimation method, and the d3 animation at the end.
There's an issue of language here. For me, an Italian, blue is dark and "azzurro" is light. I played the game assuming that "azzurro"=Blue but I guess that sensitivity is skewed by semantics here. You can try to capture mother language too and see how it affects the statistics
On my phone, turquoise is green for me, but on my laptop it's blue. I guess that's why it's called turquoise. The same thing happens with the purple spectrum. There's an unlimited amount of purple hues, ranging from red purple to blue purple. That's why there's pink.
I know my blue isn't the same as it was before Cataract surgery. The world was a lot more yellow then. The benefit of not doing both eyes the same days in terms of complications and going blind is obvious. It gave me an A/B test as well to actually see the difference myself.
Interesting. I am red/green colorblind, so would expect that I would be less sensitive to green. It turns out, my blue is 98% bluer than others. Could it be that what determines this is how much your mind overcompensates for a lack/abundance of cones in the eyes?
When you show the distribution at the end, it'd be cool to be able to select my own threshold not based on the test results but my reaction in the moment to the color palette. I found that the distribution did not line up with where I'd draw the line.
Did it yesterday right after I saw the link once and got 185 (bluer than 97%..) but I've always had some passion for colors and variations, that's also why I like CSS. Anyway, funny to share but nothing changed in my life after that.
I believe that an interval as threshold would be more interesting than a single value threshold. Perhaps if the user is shown N blocks from green to blue and then asked to drag&drop them to three buckets: green, not certain, blue?
Hmm, night mode on iPhone definitely messes with me. Without it score average, but with night mode on I got 185. Quite amazing! I can see this tool being useful for correcting monitor settings when making pixel art for games :)
This is a interesting website and I finished the test. But when I am in testing I relized that I am a daltonism and most of color that between green and blue is gray in my world :D (it just as same as my browser title bar)
My results are: bluer than 75% of the population. For you, turquoise is green. Isn't turquoise green for everyone? And, what does it mean that I'm bluer than 75% of the population?
I think it would be better to show a bunch of colors randomly and let you pick your blueness / greenness from that, instead of slowly converging to an answer with extremely similar choices near the end.
I was repeatedly asked to categorize a colour that I can only honestly describe as turquoise, as either green or blue. At the end of this process, I was told that I had failed to recognize turquoise. How silly.
"For you Turquoise is green" isn't an interesting result. There is a line at which a color isn't one of two options, it is another well-defined color.
It is a neat site, but I guess I don't understand the point of this is.
Another version with vehicles could say "To you a Van is a Truck", and you would get some results on how many people classify a Van as a Car or a Truck... but the question is flawed to begin with, and thus so are the "results".
This is like when you're at the optometrist and they keep flipping the lenses saying "better or worse?" and I'm like "better... no, worse. Hmm... well..."
It seems like the test is starts with a clear green or clear blue and then devolves into cyan and asks if you think it's blue or green. I think it's blue or green hinted cyan.
What does it mean when I get better and better at picking blues/greens on second or third attempts? Does it mean my ability to pick colors can be somehow influenced or improved?
Yes, you can absolutely get better at discriminating different colors, orientations, etc. though unfortunately improvements tend to be highly specific to the stimulus. There's a great book by Barbara Dosher called Perceptual Learning that extensively overviews the literature.
Interesting. My wife and I both took this. We used the same laptop at the same screen settings. I'm slightly more bluer than she is, but we are both pretty squarely less green.
Actually that is a test only , we agree both to testing my monitor only, and experiencing what is cyber space.. atleast soon I am ready it could be happen...
I'm reminded of xkcd's color survey map[1] and fun visualizations[2]. And a similar paper[3] with an interactive[4]. Note the variation between linguistic groups, and high variance among individuals. Might be interesting to compare the results of TFA. There's also work on using google image search to learn color from names.[5] I was sketching a kids app for "use phone camera to name and collect colors".
Today I learned that English doesn’t have an equivalent to the French world "bleu-vert" literally "blue-green" and meaning a colour in between blue and green so that it can’t be easily classed in either one (that’s not exactly like cyan which exists in French but is a precise color). Sixty percents of the time I was thinking "in between".
Amusingly, the dictionary tells me that teal is a dark bluish-green which both tells me that teal is not an exact translation but that bluish-green would be.
While that would change the distribution of threshold hues (partly due to the non-linear mix of blue and green, as sRGB transfer function wasn't inverted), it shouldn't change the conclusion itself. Also it would be hard to constantly change the lightness in such systems, as the #0000ff green would have a much larger lightness than the #00ff00 blue and there are some gaps outside of the common sRGB or even P3 color space.
Pure RGB primaries gives an easy target for “red” and “green” endpoints but that’s about it. Ideally the test should consider two endpoints with uniform lightness and chroma, and just shift the hue to form in-betweens. The transition from blue to green in RGB (or HSL) is not linear in these attributes.
That is what I believe the original comment meant to say: convert to some color space where linear interpolation for non-hue axes would be meaningful. In my knowledge, such linear interpolation will require the tone mapping due to out-of-gamut colors, and the tone mapping itself is fairly subjective.
Even if you were to use a more saturated ramp, I suspect that discontinuities due to gamut mapping with a good algorithm[1] should be less than the discontinuities due to lightness and chroma shifts in HSL, but I could be wrong.
Ah yeah, I only checked the path between sRGB #0000ff = oklch(45.2% 0.3131 264.05) and sRGB #00ff00 = oklch(86.64% 0.2948 142.50) which surely needs out-of-gamut colors. And as you have noticed from the post, there are many algorithms to handle them with different attributes of colors to preserve. CSS even has its own algorithm [1] that primarily keeps hue and lightness but allows slight alternations to avoid excessive reduction on edge cases. For the purpose of this test though, hues should be probably preserved at any cost.
While lower saturation may solve this problem, some colors do greatly depend on saturation to be correctly perceived, like brown, so I don't think it is not ideal to change that either.
for a lot of them it was neither, it was turquoise or other colors, but thats not an option. I ended up at 68% because well that's what I was forced into. Like any survey that doesn't allow N/A.
I expected this to be about qualia. It's not. What I percieve to be red might be what you perceive to be blue, but we have no way to know this, because we will both call it by the same name. We have almost no insight into the qualia of others. Colorblindness is a chink in this armor. Not that I consider this a novel insight, it's something I thought of while a 10th grader back in 1984, and subsequently read about in books predating my own thoughts, such as Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas or Godel, Escher, Bach, or some other book I can't recall, though it seems quite obvious in any case.
It came with the wave of generic TLDs about a decade ago. Apparently, it's for people who like the colour. Users of Bluesky make great use of it nowadays.
> Your boundary is at hue 168, greener than 85% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.
I mean turquoise isn't blue and isn't green, what difference it makes if some say it's closer to green and some other say it's closer to blue. It's just turquoise.
I think most people have this realization and question, probably as children.
It's probably impossible to know for sure. But I largely think we see them similarly, mainly because of favorite colors. Few people like orange, brown, tan, pea green, etc.
If we all saw colors differently, I feel like there'd be greater variety in favorites.
You both call the same tomato ripe. But if you were to switch eyes maybe you would be shocked that what the other person called a ripe tomato was actually your green
I mean, turquoise is more like cyan, but it asked me to rate this color that's in-between green and blue as either blue or green so what can I do. It's like asking if orange is yellow or red.
lmao: "Your boundary is at hue 168, greener than 85% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue."
When there is no choice to select proper color and you only forced to tell if it is green or blue, despite that you see how many green is in that blue. When you forced to call cyan a blue ... Amazing declaration of BS.
Says my blue is 57% more blue than average. I'm all right with that. For me green is more exceptional than blue because the sky and large bodies of waters are blue.
But another problem is with displaying the colors essentially full-window, which is going to be nearly-full-screen for many users. When we're staring at a screen with a particular tint, our eyes quickly do "auto white balance" that skews the results. It's the mechanism behind a bunch of optical illusions.
To address that last problem, I think the color display area should be much smaller, or you should be shown all hues at once and asked to position a cut-off point.