Show HN: What's my JND? – a colour guessing game

(keithcirkel.co.uk)

26 points | by Keithamus 14 hours ago ago

16 comments

  • vunderba 14 minutes ago

    Nice job. Kind of reminds me of this one which increases the number of squares with the odd-one out becoming more subtle as you progress further in the game, but I prefer your sliding mechanic better for this kind of game.

    https://vectorization.eu/color-perception-test

  • john_strinlai an hour ago

    surprisingly fun.

    not knowing anything about color, i will admit i am a bit confused. i scored 0.0034 and was told "if you're not already calibrating displays for a living, you're leaving money on the table". which, to me, implied i did quite well!

    but, reading the scores posted here, most people are doing a lot better than me. i doubt all of us are crazy good...

    so, i assume the front page is a typo: "most people land around 0.02" (should be 0.002, not 0.02)? if yes, then i am back to not understanding the message i got about calibrating displays, because i did quite a bit worse than 0.002.

    edit: nerd-sniping myself a little bit. but it appears (stressing: i know nothing) the "0.02" is accurate, but calculated by showing someone two colors and asking "are these different" until the person answers the question correctly 50% of the time. which is a different question than "where, precisely, is the line between these two colors". with the different question, it ends up compressing the result down by about an order of magnitude.

    • Keithamus an hour ago

      Right. The average score is under different test conditions. Obviously this game is a little silly version with very little accuracy to the lab testing, but hopefully it gets people thinking about this stuff a bit more! Which given your investigations into this, I would say it has succeeded.

      • itishappy a few seconds ago

        Fun site! I'm colorblind, but I ended up getting a 0.0028 "much better than average" score. Hmm...

        To promote some further reading:

        OKLab isn't actually a perceptually uniform colorspace. It's better than others, but it was specifically chosen as a tradeoff between accuracy and speed (hence the name OK). When you start digging this deep, you quickly learn that we have yet to invent any perceptually uniform colorspaces; even the most precise models we have end up using fits and approximations. Color has some really inconvenient properties like depending strongly on brightness and background. Frankly, given the differences in human biology (having orders of magnitude differences in relative numbers of each cone, for instance), it's surprising we agree as much as we do! Human color perception is an endless pit of complexity.

        (Note, I don't say any of this to detract from what you've built here, merely expand. Your site is awesome and I love it!)

      • john_strinlai an hour ago

        >[...] but hopefully it gets people thinking about this stuff a bit more! Which given your investigations into this, I would say it has succeeded.

        absolutely! thanks for posting it and the associated article.

  • filmgirlcw 9 hours ago

    This is such a cool deep dive into CSS colors and color theory and finding the right way to mess with color values.

  • dreday 11 hours ago

    This takes something as nerdy as decimal places in CSS colors and turns it into a fun, practical read. It feels like you’re being walked through the rabbit hole by a friend who’s done way too much homework, then hands you a few simple rules you can actually remember and use.

  • jaffathecake 14 hours ago

    The associated deep-dive article is great https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/too-much-color/

  • alexanderameye 13 hours ago

    Fun game! I could never quite clear the 0.0030 threshold. I wonder how much screen quality/calibration impacts it.

    • jaffathecake 12 hours ago

      A lot. My scores:

      - 0.0028 on my MacBook pro screen

      - 0.0045 on my Dell monitor

      - 0.0033 on my Pixel 10 pro

      And those scores are pretty consistent.

  • filmgirlcw 9 hours ago

    Super fun game! My best is 0.0018 but am usually in the ~0.0030 range

  • stonedge an hour ago

    Is higher or lower "better"?

    • john_strinlai an hour ago

      lower is better.

      it is measuring the smallest color distance you can still detect. so a lower number means you can spot the difference between two more-alike colors.

  • zakki 22 minutes ago

    is 0.0052 good or bad?

  • Biganon an hour ago

    0.0023, but now my eyes are tired

  • dreday 11 hours ago

    I thought I was good at this but I can’t get under 0.0050. I blame my screen!

    Very addictive, kudos to the dev