Is my blue your blue?

smokedetector1

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!

percentcer

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.

HoldOnAMinute

>> 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?

diziet

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

lrobinovitch

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

nubinetwork

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

dbcurtis

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?

afandian

Cool to see this experiment crowdsourced. Guy Deutscher’s “Through the Language Glass” is a very readable history of linguistic relativism, including the long history of this experiment. It even has some colour plates to illustrate. Recommended. https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/412264/through-the-language-...

technothrasher

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

hyperpape

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.

benleejamin

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.)

timnetworks

> 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?

gkhartman

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.

rendx

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

MrZander

Interesting. Looking at each in isolation, my boundary is pretty far into Green territory. But when I look at the gradient, I would place it far closer to the center. Also, I found that sometimes it looked like there were two colors. The top was green and bottom was blue. Maybe my monitor?

nicebyte

it's a neat experiment but I think it's ultimately flawed because color is usually perceived in context, and depending on context I could easily see anyone reinterpreting the hues they labeled "green" in this test as blue, and vice versa. EDIT: in general, blue is a pretty fascinating color. yes, many cultures have a somewhat blurry distinction between blue and green. Some others seem to differentiate shades of blue that others don't (i.e. in Russian "голубой" and "синий" refer to distinct colors but in English those would be just shades of blue). I guess there's something about photons in that energy band that messes with perception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-photo_blue

seemaze

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.

wat10000

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

dang

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

sega_sai

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.