Is my blue your blue?

(ismy.blue)

200 points | by theogravity 3 hours ago ago

113 comments

  • smokedetector1 2 hours ago

    The other week my wife and I were disagreeing over whether a house was green or blue. I was shocked when every passerby we asked agreed with her that it was green. I was absolutely 100% sure it was blue. Turns out according to this site, my boundary is greener than 95% of the population! Funny to see this proved out here!

    • makr17 an hour ago

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

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

      • a_shoeboy 20 minutes ago

        I have had similar conversations with my wife a few times, but I'm the one with working color vision.

    • miriam_catira 33 minutes ago

      ...I get different numbers depending on which eye I use, but both are fairly center. I didn't expect blue-green to be affected though! My left eye can't see certain shades of red as well as my right eye. Bright sunlight makes it more noticeable, but my own skin looks weirdly (sickly) yellowish with one eye and normal with the other.

      Whenever it's come up at home, my spouse simply insists "I don't need to know the difference between aqua, turquoise, and seafoam. They're all blue." At this point I just nod and agree, it's not worth the fight anymore. ;)

      • pleurotus 13 minutes ago

        ...I never found another person with the same experience. Here we are. For me though, it's not that sunlight makes it more noticeable, it's that I will see the same shades until I've had too much sunlight—eventually my left eye gets tired, I guess, and sees a lot less red than my right eye. After sleeping it resets and I see the same shade in both eyes. Maybe i should talk to a researcher about this..

    • bitexploder an hour ago

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

      • itishappy 22 minutes ago

            Blue his house
            With a blue little window
            And a blue Corvette
            And everything is blue for him
            And himself and everybody around
            'Cause he ain't got nobody to listen (to listen)
        
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BinWA0EenDY
      • strangegecko an hour ago

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

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

        • tetris11 34 minutes ago

          blue than 90%, same verdict with turqouise, though what I call turquoise is bluer than what is shown

    • VadimPR an hour ago

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

    • gobdovan an hour ago

      You've got the blues.

    • rnewme an hour ago

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

  • benleejamin an hour ago

    I think there's an anchoring effect in play here. If you select blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue -> green…, you land at the population median.

    (The point being that, once you get to a somewhat ambiguous point (after two blue selections), you can say "oh, well, compared to the last one this is {opposite color}!", and it seems most people do that.)

    • djmips an hour ago

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

    • layer8 an hour ago

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

    • make3 an hour ago

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

  • Glyptodon 3 minutes ago

    I don't like this because many of these transition colors I don't really consider blue or green but some sort of blue-green or green-blue.

    I would also trust the results more if it bounced you around a bit randomly rather than tried to center you in.

  • percentcer 2 hours ago

    I think the alternative should be "this is not blue". I was served what I would call a "teal" or "turquoise" but the alternative button shows "this is green", which it was not.

    • SunshineTheCat an hour ago

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

      • reactordev an hour ago

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

        • xmprt an hour ago

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

          • reactordev an hour ago

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

            • eikenberry 40 minutes ago

              It should probably alternate between blue/notblue... green/notgreen. I hit the same wall. Second question asked if blue/green when it was neither... and I really mean neither. I don't see cyan as a shade of blue or green, rather much like I don't see green as a shade of blue or yellow.

            • ajkjk 29 minutes ago

              There's no way for me to answer truthfully whether teal is blue or green. It is neither. Anything I give gives a false answer. The data is invalid.

      • miltonlost an hour ago

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

        • cubefox an hour ago

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

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

      • MattGaiser an hour ago

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

        • mort96 an hour ago

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

          • JasonSage an hour ago

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

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

          • airstrike an hour ago

            Ok, but presumably you can make a test that goes from 50% gray to 100% black and you have to say "this is black" or "this is gray"

          • MattGaiser 40 minutes ago

            No scientific line. But where does your mind put it if asked without being told which it is? This test is about where you perceive that line to be.

          • miltonlost an hour ago

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

    • StilesCrisis an hour ago

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

      • ajkjk 28 minutes ago

        I closed it also. What's going to happen is all the people who care about the ambiguousness leave, so the resulting population is a bad sample even of the people who open the site in the first place.

      • jedmeyers an hour ago

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

    • AntiUSAbah an hour ago

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

      :/

      • antisthenes 40 minutes ago

        That makes about as much sense as trying to compete for who can provide the most wrong answer for "2+2="

    • matt_kantor an hour ago

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

  • danbmil99 6 minutes ago

    Dunno if this is a late-in-life thing or I was always like this, but I definitely need more blue to see blue than most (this test put me at 82%, I think that means I'm in the lowest quintile for seeing blue?) Bright blue still looks mighty blue, but when light is dim, I basically see black where most would still see blue.

    Practical ramifications: * Some of my 'black' shirts are blue when it's sunny * Popular desktop themes (solarized dark) have text that is completely unreadable

    • torginus 5 minutes ago

      I think your monitor or room lighting might just be different from others'

  • ticulatedspline 39 minutes ago

    72 green though where it drew me on the gradient at the end I definitely would say the line is on green. and the swatch that is says I think would be blue was, well turquoise and not "blue".

    my path was basically: ok def blue, ok cyan which would be "blue", greenish sea-foam? teal? ok now I wouldn't call these green Or blue . Then kinda bobbled the guess

    crappy monitor aside, Feels like there's a combination of factors, some color fatigue from looking at a full screen saturated color and I think some "over thinking" the colors.

  • technothrasher an hour ago

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

    • beejiu 35 minutes ago

      I got a 98-percentile result and realised my Mac had Night Shift turned on.

    • rootusrootus an hour ago

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

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

    • hermitShell an hour ago

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

    • yieldcrv an hour ago

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

  • seemaze an hour ago

    This makes no sense. It's like asking:

        "Alice is in Denver. Is Alice in (a) Canada or (b) Mexico?"
    
        - Your boundary between Canada and Mexico is at 40° latitude, more southern than 53% of the population.
    • hmokiguess an hour ago
    • phaedrus an hour ago

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

    • miltonlost an hour ago

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

      • Rapzid 3 minutes ago

        > Colors are a fuzzy continuum

        Denver is teal, the USA blue-green. Canada is Blue, and Mexico is green.

        Their analogy is pretty on point.

  • Rapzid 9 minutes ago

    I don't find this compelling as it seems to me it's well acknowledged there are colors that are BOTH. As in there are colors widely considered to be blue-green. Blue and Green.

  • porphyra an hour ago

    There's a big cultural component to it, and many languages don't even distinguish blue and green! Also many languages only distinguish them surprisingly recently --- for example, Chinese and Japanese used to use the word 青 which can refer to both blue and green, and even now, the color of the sky in the Republic of China (Taiwanese) flag is referred to by that character.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...

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

    • keane 19 minutes ago

      Same with Old and Middle Irish (1200 AD): "glas was a blanket term for colors ranging from green to blue to various shades of gray"

      I like to think this may have had something to do with them having both blue and green in their political usage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Patrick%27s_blue

  • sega_sai an hour ago

    One thing that I find interesting when thinking about colour perception, is that even if two people agree that a given colour is red, there is no way to know (as far as I am aware) that they actually perceive it in the same way. Maybe the brain of one person paints it red, and another paints it differently, and there is no way to know as we can't get into other people's heads.

    • layer8 an hour ago

      That’s assuming that there is something like a “true” internal color that external colors are mapped onto. I think it’s more likely that for the brain, “red” is just “that hue signal range that red things have”. Which is roughly the same for everyone (modulo color blindness), in the sense that if one person sees two objects as red, another person will also see them as the same color, and will perceive the same brightness and hue relation relative to other objects with adjacent brightness and/or hue.

      Meaning, there is no absolute color, the brain just learns what things have the same color, and how similar or dissimilar they are in hue to other objects. And for example “cold” colors are cold because we associate them with cold things, not because of some independent “qualia”.

    • keane an hour ago
    • shagie an hour ago

      I've got an anecdote that says that they don't.

      If I'm looking at a certain color of green illumination and then cover one eye then the other, my perception of that color shifts slightly. It's still green, but with one eye it is "brighter" than the other eye.

    • rootusrootus an hour ago

      yep, this is the sort of question I pose to my kids. “How can you know that what you see as blue is not what I see as red?”

    • VadimPR an hour ago

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

  • MrZander an hour ago

    Interesting. Looking at each in isolation, my boundary is pretty far into Green territory. But when I look at the gradient, I would place it far closer to the center.

    Also, I found that sometimes it looked like there were two colors. The top was green and bottom was blue. Maybe my monitor?

  • diziet an hour ago

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

    • lokar an hour ago

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

      I think the intent here is clear in context.

  • coldtea 16 minutes ago

    If you're not colorblind, yes. More or less.

    Not much sense for the evolutionary machinery to keep the whole backend the same, but diverge in the perception part.

  • hyperpape an hour ago

    I think this site is doing a binary search, so that you narrow down on a boundary.

    It would be much funnier, and also more insightful, if it didn't do this and let you contradict yourself.

    • aaronharnly an hour ago

      Yeah, as I was toggling "blue" / "green" / "blue" / "green" I had the distinct sensation that it might just show me that I was in a region where I couldn't even make a consistent distinction.

  • afandian an hour ago

    Cool to see this experiment crowdsourced.

    Guy Deutscher’s “Through the Language Glass” is a very readable history of linguistic relativism, including the long history of this experiment. It even has some colour plates to illustrate. Recommended.

    https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/412264/through-the-language-...

  • gkhartman an hour ago

    How much does display calibration factor into this? I'm fairly confident it must impact the results, but unsure how much error it would introduce.

    • AntiUSAbah an hour ago

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

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

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

      • swiftcoder an hour ago

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

  • dbcurtis an hour ago

    Who else tried with both eyes? A few years ago I had an implant to treat cataracts. It was notable at the time that the "new" eye was less yellow-tinted than the aged-in-place eye. I was told that the lens does yellow with age. Over time, my brain mostly adjusted, but on this test I did notice a subtle hue difference between eyes. Did anyone else try that experiment?

    • eecc an hour ago

      Can you accommodate with the implant?

      • dbcurtis an hour ago

        No. I got it set for distance vision. There are modern implants that are "multi-focal". But they work by spreading out the light, so everything is less bright at any distance. My two pieces of anecdata are: 1. A friend with multi-focal implants says that he needs a very bright light for reading now. Which is one of the reasons I avoided multi-focal. 2. My optometrist got multi-focal, and he noted that it required retraining his brain somewhat, because now instead of accommodation providing focus, focus requires mental attention to the subject of interest.

        Cataract implant technology is moving very fast, and my data is about 5 years old, so YMMV.

  • hmokiguess an hour ago
  • FarmerPotato 42 minutes ago

    Thanks to the TMS9918, I know cyan when I see it! Years of seeing cyan on a composite monitor where hue is tricky to adjust. My tolerance for the amount of green allowed in cyan is higher. And if it's cyan, it's blue. I see I classified quite a few greenish as cyan therefore blue.

  • jp57 34 minutes ago

    I have my doubts about the value of a two-alternative forced choice task for this. I was pretty much answering randomly both of the time because I wouldn't ncessarily have called either green or blue.

  • rendx an hour ago

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

  • harrall an hour ago

    One of my eyes sees (very) slightly greener than the other one.

    But with both eyes I got

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

    I should test with one eye.

  • lrobinovitch an hour ago

    This is great!

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

  • red75prime an hour ago

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

  • nubinetwork an hour ago

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

    • QuantumNomad_ an hour ago

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

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

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

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

  • stephenlf 30 minutes ago

    Fun. Are you accepting PRs? I would love to add a “share” button that shares the color I landed on

  • HoldOnAMinute an hour ago

    >> Your boundary is at hue 177, bluer than 76% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.

    Not really sure how to interpret this. Where is "normal" on the curve?

    • dbcurtis an hour ago

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

    • rationalist an hour ago

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

  • malbs 38 minutes ago

    Also no way to account for the variation of LCD displays. The same "colour" can look different on two different panels

  • mbo an hour ago

    I feel like there needs to be some sort of intermediate black screen between the questions, a visual "palette cleanser" if you will. I was actively noticing the saturation of the color decline as I stared at the screen.

  • cyost an hour ago

    It looks like this project got forked and updated further https://ismycolor.com/

    • fourthark 30 minutes ago

      Interesting, I got a completely different result on green/blue on this one, way more green whereas I got average on the individual test. Going between very different colors makes it hard to reset - they might consider breaks between spectra.

  • egonschiele an hour ago

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

  • wilj an hour ago

    This is awesome! I have a slight case of tritanopia in one eye and it was neat to see the difference. My boundary is bluer by 59% in one eye and 87% in the other. It tracks with what I would have expected.

  • nox21125 an hour ago

    >> Your boundary is at hue 173, greener than 57% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.

    very subtle changes in color after the first two. it also seems to be repeating blue -> green -> blue -> green, for me atleast.

  • layer8 an hour ago

    This only checks a single brightness level per hue. I bet that two people who agree for those levels might very well disagree at other levels, and vice versa.

  • iterateoften an hour ago

    Im left delighted to find out something new, but left wanting to know how to use it.

    Like if im 75% on the green transition, how do i use this information.

    • glial an hour ago

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

  • jameson an hour ago

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

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

    • chao- an hour ago

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

  • dueltmp_yufsy an hour ago

    I was always fascinated by this kind of question as a kid. Like I would imagine that everyone had all the colors mixed up and we were each seeing something different.

  • dang an hour ago

    Related:

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

  • tjwebbnorfolk an hour ago

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

  • anyfoo 37 minutes ago

    Wow. Did anyone else have some serious trouble with this?

    The first color was obvious to me, as it was designed to be (it even tells you if you intentionally misclick). But at the very next color, the first "test color", I literally face palmed and said "oh my god" out loudly.

    It was so, so hard for me to decide. I really just wanted to pick a non-existent "teal" option. Both "blue" or "green" felt wrong and equally right at the same time.

    It just got harder from there. At the end, it told me that my threshold is "bluer than 80% of the population", but honestly, I don't think that's really true in my case. I was so ambivalent, my choices really felt random to me very quickly.

  • timnetworks an hour ago

    > Your boundary is at hue 172, greener than 63% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.

    isn't turquoise exactly (50%) between the two?

    • chao- an hour ago

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

  • softbuilder 35 minutes ago

    I want this but for blue vs. purple.

  • nektro an hour ago

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

  • freecodyx 26 minutes ago

    cyan is neither blue nor green

  • u8080 30 minutes ago

    Midori

  • wat10000 an hour ago

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

  • zuminator an hour ago

    When the final threshold image was displayed, I felt that the boundary was too far over to the left and I had a fair amount of green on the blue side.

    I think this would work better if the hues jumped around a bit instead of blatantly triangulating, so that you wouldn't be biased by your prior semection.

  • antisthenes 42 minutes ago

    This assumes that the person you're testing isn't aware of the whole category of colors that sit between green and blue?

    There's teal, cyan, aquamarine, etc...It's such a uniquely american notion to force someone to categorize something (incorrectly) into one of 2 things. Almost a comical parallel to the political system.

  • moffkalast an hour ago

    This is cyan!

  • nicebyte an hour ago

    it's a neat experiment but I think it's ultimately flawed because color is usually perceived in context, and depending on context I could easily see anyone reinterpreting the hues they labeled "green" in this test as blue, and vice versa.

    EDIT: in general, blue is a pretty fascinating color. yes, many cultures have a somewhat blurry distinction between blue and green. Some others seem to differentiate shades of blue that others don't (i.e. in Russian "голубой" and "синий" refer to distinct colors but in English those would be just shades of blue). I guess there's something about photons in that energy band that messes with perception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-photo_blue