As other commenters here have noted, I found this interesting but a little frustrating. The second color it asks about is clearly cyan (or turquoise). For me, this is like showing an orange screen and asking if it is red or yellow.<p>I understand that across cultures "orange" does not exist as a distinctly named color (it only got its name in most European languages around the 1500s), but as someone who was trained since preschool that orange is a distinct color, it would feel wrong to "round" it to red or yellow.<p>I haven't had green-cyan-blue drilled into me the same way as red-orange-yellow. So sometimes I do "round" it. I might note how "green" some cyan river water is, or call something cyan "blue" when it is next to something kelly green. But when I just have a screenfull of pure cyan light, I don't know what else to call it.<p>As a side note, I do wonder how differently a child would perceive color if they were taught more than 7 colors in preschool.
People are freaking out about this test like it’s some judgement of their character or something. I just picked “green” or “blue” without thinking.<p>The biggest problem here is that people have wildly uncalibrated monitors that often have color cast tints. I color calibrate my monitors and even my factory calibrated MacBook has a slight green tint.<p>People should also do hue differentiation tests like this one to see if they have any color deficiency: <a href="https://www.xrite.com/hue-test" rel="nofollow">https://www.xrite.com/hue-test</a><p>That’s way more interesting.
<i>> The biggest problem here is that people have wildly uncalibrated monitors that often have color cast tints. I color calibrate my monitors and even my factory calibrated MacBook has a slight green tint.</i><p>Even if anyone actually calibrated their screens, many cheap monitor panels are so shitty the calibration can’t help. I bought two 4K LG monitors at the same time and based on serial numbers, they’re likely from the same batch but LG likes to mix panels on their cheaper products. They have <i>wildly</i> different color spaces to the point where one swallows several points of grayscale*, which means I have to use the right monitor when viewing sites otherwise I lose the subtle gray-on-white that designers love so much.<p>* black crush I think its called
By what method would you suggest calibrating one's monitor? I use Debian Linux if that's a factor.
You can do it on Linux but you need to buy a device you attach to your monitor. I have a Spyder X Pro but there are others.<p>It’s like $200 and it’s not worth it unless you do color sensitive work (photo editing, printing or video editing) and you have an expensive monitor or expensive laptop with good color support. Many monitors will fail so badly the calibration won’t be able to fix it.<p>But if you’ve ever had a lot of trouble trying to get colors to match when printing or between devices, it could be a godsend, although it’s only <i>one</i> of the many reasons colors might not match.
>As other commenters here have noted, I found this interesting but a little frustrating. The second color it asks about is clearly cyan (or turquoise). For me, this is like showing an orange screen and asking if it is red or yellow.<p>This, it commonly gets reposted on reddit and the colorblind sub, but it's basically worthless because most people acknowledge that there is a color between blue and green and forcing them to choose one or the other doesn't give you any valuable information.
> most people acknowledge that there is a color between blue and green<p>For many people, there is no difference between blue and green at all!<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...</a>
Yes, very annoying, we know from extensive work in psychometrics that single-item, binary / forced-choice items produce junk responses that are heavily contaminated with response styles (answer in most socially-desirable way, select closest response to mouse/finger, select same response as last time, select random response, etc). Just give people an out ("Diagree with the question / premises", "Prefer not to answer", "Unsure / Can't decide", etc) and make sure you have e.g. a 5-7 point Likert-type scale for multiple items, or up to an 11-point scale for single items.<p>This kind of site / demo does none of the above, and so can't even be trusted for directional effects (the direction of response may simple be due to the type of people responding, etc).
I was having a discussion closely related to this recently because of my background in philosophy of language. Languages are functional, but not rigid. The rules and referents of "blue" become kind of pointless around the edges, and narrow words like cyan or turquoise -- even words borrowed from other languages -- are more functional. This is exaggerated further when the functionality becomes very important, which is where technical jargon starts to come into play. Languages should useful to the speaker; they do not define the constraints of the speaker. "Blue" is useful for the average English speaker, but completely useless for a graphic designer.
My daughter was watching Blue's Clues. They were doing color combinations (red + blue = purple, yellow + blue = green, etc). They then also did a further step, blue + green = cyan, and did green + yellow = chartreuse. Now maybe its my male engineer brain, but I haven't heard of that color in 36 years, but it does make sense and it is rather distinct.
> Now maybe its my male engineer brain, but I haven't heard of that color in 36 years, but it does make sense and it is rather distinct.<p>You need to get into either fishing (chartreuse lures are common) or cocktails: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur)</a> .
The funny part about color spaces being that you can't make (pure) cyan out of green and blue, which is exactly why CMYK is used over RYB in inks.<p>(I mostly think about colours in Hue-Saturation-Value terms, and a hue wheel of blue-cyan-green-yellow-orange-red-purple)
I only know chartreuse from fishing lures.
> When we want violet, we know just what to do. Just mix our good friends purple and blue.<p>I still refuse to believe that purple and violet are different colors.
I agreed with you, and then went to the Wikipedia pages for both. I might have changed my mind now.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_(color)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_(color)</a>
This test is really using how English organizes color. In English, blue and green are basic color terms ([<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms</a>](<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms</a>)). You're right that we would have trouble with an orange screen if we were asked to call it red or yellow, but that's because orange is also a basic color term in English.<p>Other languages draw those boundaries in different places. For example, in Russian, light blue and dark blue are separate basic color terms (goluboy vs. siniy), so asking a Russian speaker to collapse those into a single category would feel just as wrong as collapsing orange into red or yellow does to us.<p>Cyan isn't a basic color term in English. So yes, the test is basically asking: if you had to assign this color to one of the basic English categories, what would it be?<p>The frustration you're describing is kind of the point. With something like orange, English gives us a clear category, so "rounding" feels wrong. With cyan, it doesn't, so people end up splitting it differently.
The whole point is to measure where you draw the line between blue and green, which is going to be in turquoise territory.<p>When you finish the test it even tells you if you consider turquoise blue or green.
Except you can reject the very (stupid) question / framing, in which case, the response is to either close the tab, or respond in a particular response style, neither of which makes the data more informative. This kind of clumsy stuff is just dumb with what we know now, edutainment distraction for the HN crowd.
Logically I understand that cyan is directly between green and blue, but my brain believes it's 100% blue.
Cyan isn't between green and blue, at least not completely. If you take green and blue, you won't be able to represent a good chunk of cyan hues. It feels greenish and blueish, but is neither, and is broader than any combination of the two, which is partly why some bright cyan objects (like the bird eggs on Wikipedia) look kind of unnaturally intense. Those eggs are a bright, slightly blue-leaning cyan.
BTW, cyan is very poorly represented by sRGB color space. I was delighted to see the real vibrant cyan of the Mediterranean sea.
You might like this then. [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://dynomight.net/colors/#2" rel="nofollow">https://dynomight.net/colors/#2</a>
and device dependent. this is a very tricky thing to get rendered consistently
Yes, for me cyan is firmly a shade of blue, and turquoise is a blue color that's somewhat greenish.
funny thing is that I would have said cyan was blue going into this, but the outcome had me classifying the boundary at "more blue than 93% of the population" -- meaning that I classed cyan as green when asked, without even remotely questioning it.
Same for me, I classify it as blue.
It does seem like more of a test of if you consider turquoise to be "a green" or "a blue"
I mean, that's the whole point of this exercise. In reality there is no hard line between green and blue, and if you make someone pick, their line is going to be entirely subjective, and different than others.
That's like saying there's no hard line between e.g. white and gray, or even white and black if we take it to an extreme. And that is accurate, if you slowly shift between the two then people will claim a transition at slightly different points, but it's entirely meaningless because it's (getting back to the blue/green example) not like anybody is going to insist 'no that's blue!' or 'no that's green!' It's obvious that it's intentionally ambiguous and so any pick at such a point is going to be largely arbitrary with little attachment held by anybody.<p>[1] - <a href="https://colordesigner.io/color-mixer" rel="nofollow">https://colordesigner.io/color-mixer</a>
Not only that but once you pick green or blue it's going to skew your results in that direction. I got a higher level of blue as my result but it's only because that's what I picked since I had to pick one of them.
I’m aware of cyan, of course, but it never occurred to me while doing this quiz, because the point was clearly to choose between blue and green. Of course there’s cyan, turquoise, teal, sky blue, etc., but the point is to make the potentially difficult choice between only blue and green.<p>Also, as it happens, I feel like cyan is just not really in our everyday vocabulary if you’re assigning colors to everyday objects. Maybe it’s because it’s rare to see something truly that bright and saturated. I feel like in practice I would end up just saying “blue-green” more than cyan, turquoise, teal, etc.
let's be honest, orange is really a burnt yellow
Orange is bright brown!<p>By the way, my comment is entirely in jest.<p>I would struggle to have to choose between only the words "red" and "yellow" to describe orange colours. Except for the orange fruit. I'm happy calling those yellow.<p>But the YCombinator logo? Yellowish red?
Came here to say the same thing.<p>Like, I'd be interested to see if where my boundaries between blue and cyan, or cyan and green, are compared to the rest of the population.<p>But there's a whole other color between blue and green! A color that is <i>primary</i> under the subtractive CMYK model.<p>And it's an <i>even bigger</i> difference than with orange, because while red and yellow are 60° apart on the color wheel so that orange is 30° from each, blue and green are a full 120° apart on the color wheel, with cyan being 60° from each. So it's actually even worse -- it's as bad/nonsensical as showing yellow and asking if yellow is red or green.
it's either blue, or it's green. pick a side, coward
This was exactly my issue. There was no perception issue I could clearly identify the intermediate color as neither truly blue or green.
It's almost like color is a spectrum of light and we just arbitrarily slice it and decide "this has a name" because we are finite being who demand order from things that are not ordered and then demand further order from that order and get REALLY mad.
[dead]
Taught by whom? I hear parents are wonderful teachers.<p>Also, lots of kids don't even go to preschool.
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!
Many languages considered green and blue so closely related that they grouped them together under a single term: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...</a>
<i>grue</i>
It's better than <i>bleen</i> I suppose.<p>Speaking of, I'd be curious about a similar experiment but one that compares how grotesque, for lack of a better word, certain words sound. The word <i>bleen</i> makes me uncomfortable, I think because my brain automatically goes to <i>spleen</i>; <i>grue</i> isn't my favorite either but I prefer it to <i>bleen</i>.<p>I'm curious how universal that is though. Do others have similarly aligned preferences for one word over the other, or are our feelings about them more evenly spread?
This one in particular is going to be difficult to get good results. Depending on your era you may have been eaten by a grue at some point.
Not a native speaker, bleen for me got auto corrected by my brain to green. It doesn't make me uncomfortable, but I'd prefer grue because my brain will immediately understand we're talking about the umbrella term. If grue is said out of context, I'd imagine Gru from despicable me, when written I'd imagine gruel, but, again, because I'm not a native speaker, instead of yucky food I'd instead think about that episode of Masha and the Bear where they end up with a houseful of the porridge.
"grue" has a specific meaning in philosophy: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction</a>
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."<p>My wife and I go round and round about what is and isn't blue and/or green.
That’s amusing because I am the converse: my boundary is bluer than 98% of the population. To a first approximation, blue is a very specific thing and all the other colors appear strongly non-blue to me. I do wonder where this preference came from, but it explains all the puzzling interactions between my wife and I over the years.
My boundary is also greener than 95% of the population. I think it's because I mentally separate cyan from green and blue, but still see cyan as a shade of blue. If you asked me what color it was without forcing green or blue, I'd have answered cyan on most of them.
...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.<p>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. ;)
...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..
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!
I am bluer than 78%. Colors. How do they work.
<p><pre><code> 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)
</code></pre>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BinWA0EenDY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BinWA0EenDY</a>
I'm bluer than 98% apparently. For me, turquoise is green. I didn't realize that's not normal.<p>If I'm off on a detail like that, then...uh oh.
90% here, and it makes sense. I'm very picky about saying something is blue!
You've got the blues.
Same situation happened to me, and I have same test result as you.
I have this with a coat, but it's blue vs gray. Would be interesting to generalize this tool not just for other colours, but for other colour properties like saturation not just hue.
Younger locals who have mostly or only known the LED think it's a bit odd, but just call them blue because that's the common convention and many youths may think that the former lights might have actually been blue.<p>IIRC from when I moved to Japan the first time (30+ y ago) when the old lights were standard, being a wildly curious Gaijin enough to ask "why" about these kinds of strange contradictions, and having lots of exposure in that time to senior citizens who had the spare time and inclination to humor my incessant questions, several of these octogenarian to centarians remembered the introduction of the first gen traffic lights, when the automobile became common enough to require them; and this seeming contradiction was new; this was the explanation I have heard common across several distinct conversations in different towns:<p>1. 緑 "midori" as a character and word for green was not very common usage before the end of WWII.<p>2. The (pre-LED) lamps for all three were yellow bulbs viewed through glass filters that were 'red', 'clear-somewhat yellow', and 'blue' - so even though it may appear green, the blue was for the color of the glass.<p>Also because 青い "aoi" has persisted in use for certain shades of 'green' - for example green apples and leafy fresh veggies; so this 'blue' seems to match the actual color of the light and has an implicit meaning for Japanese - in the sense of 'go while light is still fresh' - and Japanese humor is primarily Punny instead of being actually Funny, so this double meaning resonates even after switching to truly green LED light sources.
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.
100%. It's like being asked is this black or white and being shown 50% grey.
That’s the point of this. To find out where in that spectrum your vision lands, not to get a perfect score.
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.
But that is wrong. This doesn't test colour perception or vision, it tests verbal classification of colour perception into a forced binary. Everyone could be perceiving the colour qualia 100% identically, but simply choosing different linguistic cutpoints, meaning you can't say this is about vision / perception at all (it may just be about language use).
It’s not really the same, because black and white strongly connote being at the far ends of their continuum (lightness), and are thus opposites, whereas blue and green are more vaguely specified as nearby spots on their continuum (hue).
Yeah, but is the gray to you more look more black or more white? That's the point.
That is the point of the exercise though. Is 50% really where you draw the line?
But the point is, there <i>is</i> 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.
I see it as having a blue component and a green component. If the mixture has more green than blue, then it's green.<p>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.
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"
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.
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?
I think you're (accidentally?) hitting on exactly the point there.<p>For some people's language usage, blue and green are adjacent colors, and thus defining a point that divides them is perfectly fine.<p>For other people, these are not adjacent -- for some people, there's a single color (aqua? turquoise?) between them, and green and turquoise are adjacent colors, as are turquoise and blue, and it's reasonable to ask about a dividing point between those adjacent pairs.<p>For those who don't use language this way -- do you consider red and blue adjacent, or do you consider purple (violet?) a necessary intermediate? Are you comfortable defining a point between red and blue, or are you instead comfortable defining a point between red and purple, and a point between purple and blue?<p>And for all I know, there are people for whom blue and green (or blue and red) have a distance greater than one, or greater than two...
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.
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.
Same here, it's often neither blue nor green, so this experiment is pointless.
Thats the exact point of this experiment to define the inbetween and move it to either green or blue.<p>:/
Wrong way to do it. We know from psychometrics that forced binaries like this just create junk (people disagree with the question, so just choose a forced answer based on some heuristic for each such question like "closest to my mouse / finger" or "most socially desirable" or "same as last time"). So you aren't measuring what you think when you force choice like this.<p>If you're going to go with linguistic self-report and a single item, you really want something like an 11-point Likert scale. A smart design might get e.g. a person's rating of "blue-ness vs. green-ness" on an 11-point scale, then determine the optimal cutpoint via e.g. clustering, logistic regression, or some other method, to really get something meaningful.
That makes about as much sense as trying to compete for who can provide the most wrong answer for "2+2="
It's a linguistics thing, it's about word usage more than about colour. You ask someone to get a book off the shelf, and you say "get the blue book" and the person is confused because they see a green book.<p>We are usually not specific in our day-to-day language, and this exposes/clarifies the issue.
I interpreted the buttons to mean "this is bluer than it is green" and "this is greener than it is blue".
In linguistics this sort of thinking comes from 'basic color term' theory, which lays out heuristics for deciding if a word for a color in a given language is 'basic'. 2 things going against these blue-green terms are:<p>* They refer to specific objects (a duck and a stone), eventually these referents can be transcended though, like with the case of orange.
* Their frequency is roughly similar to each other (along with cyan, aqua, etc.), so there's no one term for this range (e.g. there's no doubt in a corpus of English that red is the basic color term for its spectrum).
I would love to know if "Cambridge Blue" is actually blue to the average person, because, to me, it's green...<p>[0] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Blue_(colour)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Blue_(colour)</a>
That's beige, but green.
that's green! whoever invented the name of the colour had a different vision
"for you, turquoise is blue." Well no, it's turquoise, that's why we gave it a whole different word.
Some languages uses the terms "turquoise green" and "turquoise blue", but still have "turquoise" as a standalone. It would be interesting to have that tested, e.g. when do you use each term, when do you go from "turquoise blue" to "this is just turquoise"?
> <i>Well no, it's turquoise, that's why we gave it a whole different word.</i><p>For some people "pink" does not exist as a concept, it is "light red". In English we talk about "light blue", but an Italian may talk about <i>azzurro</i> (<i>galazio</i> (γαλάζιο) in Greek; <i>kachol</i> (כחול) in Hebrew). Is <i>azzurro</i> its own colour different from "blue" for everyone, or only for Italians? Is "pink" a different colour than (light) red?<p>Before the different word of "turquoise" was created, did the colour still exist and/or be perceived?<p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turquoise#Names" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turquoise#Names</a><p>If a language/culture does not have a word for "blue" does that mean the colour does not exist?<p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms</a><p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_language" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_lang...</a><p>Where does "white" end and "grey" begin? Where does "grey" end and "black" begin?<p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_white" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_white</a><p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_gray" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_gray</a><p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_black" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_black</a><p>Also, a bit of fun with brown:<p>* <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU</a>
Sapir-Worf and its ilk (if we don't have the language/concept, we can't perceive the difference/thing) are widely disproven and debunked, and don't even pass the smell test (learning new concepts and perceiving new things would be impossible). That kind of thinking is so tedious and decades out of date with modern cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, etc.
Not everything you listed is the same.<p>> Is "pink" a different colour than (light) red?<p>No, it's a different word for it.<p>> Where does "white" end and "grey" begin?<p>When any amount of black is added to white.<p>> Where does "grey" end and "black" begin?<p>When the color is 100% black.<p>White and black are not the same as red, green, or blue. Tinting or shading a color with white or black does not change the color, it lightens or darkens it. That's not the same for RGB. Combining those results in other colors, regardless if a culture has a specific name for it.
Haha I got "for you, turquoise is green" and I was like... Yeah, is it not?
This is the first time I realized that turquoise <i>is</i> the gray area.
Agree, this seemed silly. It seems to be more a question of "would you say turquise is blue or green?" Rather than a question of our blues match. Better imo would be to ask something like paired colours and pick the "more blue" one. Cool idea for a website, but imo poorly formulated.
But turquoise can be a blue, just because we have a specific word, doesn't mean more general words are invalieated or made as specific.<p>For example, things can be small or big, a mouse is small, if you refine the vocabulary to include 10 size words, and the mouse is now minuscule, it is still small.
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.<p>(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.)
I wouldn't assume most people do that. For me the last few looked basically the same so I selected the same color for all of them.
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.
That's if you're matching about 40% of the population.<p>For some, it might be blue -> blue -> blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue.
That doesn’t explain why I landed 92% off the population median.
it's a binary search, not too surprising. search over a unidimensional ordered space
Interestingly, there are several languages where blue and green are one color
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...</a>
This makes no sense. It's like asking:<p><pre><code> "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.</code></pre>
I recommend this reading: <a href="https://empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of-the-world-how-we-gave-colors-names-and-it-messed-with-our-brains-part-i/" rel="nofollow">https://empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of...</a>
What if it was phrased differently?<p>Rather than asking "Is this blue or green?", it's "Does this look more blue to you, or more green to you?"<p>Because then your analogy becomes "Is Alice closer to Canada or Mexico?"
Someone should make a parody site asking whether shades of yellow are red or violet.
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.
Wow, crazy to see someone thinking there's an official objective color definition
I never understood "forced classification" games like this (as an aside, it's also why I always hated Myers Briggs). Maybe it's because I'm somewhere on the spectrum, but it always seems like a dumb, false choice to me.<p>For example, when I saw the second color, "aqua" immediately popped into my mind. Aqua is <i>literally</i> defined as #00FFFF in RGB color space - no red, equal (max) parts blue and green. So it just felt like flipping a coin to me as it felt neither more blue nor more green.
But what about the definition of aqua outside of any digital color space?<p>I feel like using only RGB values to define 'aqua' is a bit reductive as it is merely a specification in a specific environment trying to render a type of color but with inherent limitations such as not being able to reproduce the whole spectrum, color accuracy on the display, etc. etc. there's a lot of other parameters along with your own individual color perception that goes beyond "it's equal values blue and green within the RGB color-space"<p>But then as I list all these things I think I arrive at the same conclusion as you, it feels like a dumb false choice haha
This test finds the midpoints of people's spectrum. They're not asking is "is this completely blue or completely green" but rather "is this more blue or green"
This is the wrong way to do it, psychometrically, see here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47929056">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47929056</a>. You need to provide people gradations, or you get junk responses / abandonment, and your instrument doesn't measure what you think.
It's a fun toy website.
It's ok that there are things you don't understand in the world. It's just as valid for them to exist, as it is you are upset about it.<p>Even if aqua is neither more green or more blue, wouldn't it be interesting if when given the choice, the outcome leans toward green or blue to a statistically significant degree? or perhaps that there are differences in how it's perceived based on measurable factors like geography, wealth, height, weight, etc?<p>Collecting data is how we learn, and discover new things. Even if it seems dumb to you.
This is stupid without color calibration, or even contrast/brightness levels on your monitor, which can turn these turquoise shades into other colors entirely.
Should this be called "Is my monitor's blue your monitor's blue?"
I got a 98-percentile result and realised my Mac had Night Shift turned on.
And what if you are wearing blue blocker readers? I am, and perhaps unsurprisingly my result was greener than average.<p>ETA: But of course when I retook the test without my glasses, I went even greener.
Exactly, and how bright is your display compared to your surroundings at time of viewing?
Maybe both are true, if someone grows up and learns through a specific monitor, maybe that will influence and define their blue definition.
followed by the number of rods and cones in your eyes, as well as their own sensitivity, as well as your language
I'm sure this isn't an original thought, but I wonder how others see colors. Irrespective of color blindness, is what I know as red appear as blue to someone else? How would you even know or describe it? "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple." And they say, "Yes, exactly." But what they're truly seeing is what YOU know as blue. They see something different than you do, but to them that color has always been called red - even though, if you were to see it as them, it's blue.
The term you're looking for is "qualia" - one's own experience of sensory inputs, which cannot be compared with others' except through allegory.
The scenario you're describing seems like more of a language thing than a perception thing. We generally learn names of colors by references to common objects. I would argue that if people agree something is "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple" then it doesn't really matter what you're seeing, that color is red.
I vividly remember my friend and I first thinking of this question during a sleepover at around 13 years old, as we stayed awake late talking about what seemed at the time like the deep philosophies of life. This isn't to say that it's a bad question, but more that it's funny how everyone seems to come up with this question independently at some point. I've read many others with the same question since.
Yup, always wondered this as well! The word for each internal subjective experience is called qualia.<p>Pretty much impossible to prove the original question until we're able to see through someone else's eyes and brain (if we ever get there, that's probably the least of our philosophical worries :D)
Have I got a Wikipedia article for you!<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia</a>
We know for a fact that bees or dogs perceive color very differently. But in between humans, the perception of physical sensations can still be resolved when we consider near-identical genetics.<p>But it's way more fun when you apply it to abstract concepts like love, happiness, or fear!<p>"Wittgenstein's beetle" is the mind-blowing concept for today if you want to dive deeper into this rabbit hole :)
If you want to explore it further, look up the philosophical aspects of the hard problem of consciousness. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness</a>
It would be interesting to see if llms all share the same internal representation of red. It might hint towards how it works for humans.<p>Note: I'm not sure this is formulated well, or even if I am able to articulate this correctly.
Chemistry is the same for each of us, as is physics, so I'd be inclined to think that red is the same red for everyone.
You'd be inclined to, but no, of the little we do understand about human perception, we do understand enough by now to say that different people can genuinely experience and perceive the world differently, sometimes wildly so.<p>Look into aphantasia (lack of mental imagery), anendophasia (lack of inner voice).
I have thought about this many times. The same could be asked about other senses as well like taste, do we both interpret the taste of a banana the same?<p>At the end of the day what exactly are our senses? Are they simply our brains interpretation of the energies that surround us?<p>Apparently about 4.4% of the population experiences chromesthesia in which they have a blending of their senses and will see colors or shapes when hearing music.<p>My opinion is that it is impossible to know and if I had to bet I would bet that we all experience things slightly different. That is only based on the thought that from an evolutionary standpoint we already have many diverse traits from one another. It's another one of those philosophical thoughts we most likely could never answer.
It's crazy to me that most people don't get it. This is not a "who knows the exact name of this hex color" game, it's "<i>more blue</i> or <i>more green</i>?"<p>Orange is its own color, but is this hue it 51% red or 51% yellow?
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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Sky_with_a_White_Sun" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Sky_with_a_White_Sun</a>
Same applies for grey, and many other colours and things. For Indonesian culture, grey is the colour of an overcast/hazy/dusty/ash/pale day, as such, it includes any desaturated colour, especially (most commonly) light blues; so for them two blue banknotes, one saturated and one desaturated are clearly different colours and they are perplexed as to why westerners mix them up. More research of this <<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms</a>>. From my research, a lot of this comes from whether a culture's consideration of a colour is from natural phenomena, or from colour theory (mixing the primary colours to generate the secondary colours, developing color wheels, acquiring distinctions for hue, saturation, lightness, etc). Take "orange" in English, or "cokelat" (the colour brown, and chocolate) and "oranye" (to describe the colour of a ripe orange/"jeruk manis") in Indonesia. Sometimes with cross-cultural intermixing, an object could be named after a colour in one culture, then that object is injected into another culture, and that culture then names the colour after that object. Such cultural introductions also extends to mythology and affect, lighter shades could be considered young or easy (as is "muda" in Indonesian), white could be considered for pure or wealthy or sickly or light, dark for ground/earth or peasant or tanned/healthy, red for blood/danger or passion or love; blue-green for nausea or life/vitality/fertility; same also applies for gender and pronouns; man as in mankind, or man as in male, and their inter-cultural/educational corruption/degradations/influences/experiential-biases/subjectivity.
Same with Old and Middle Irish (1200 AD): "<i>glas</i> was a blanket term for colors ranging from green to blue to various shades of gray"<p>I like to think this may have had something to do with them having both blue and green in their political usage: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Patrick%27s_blue" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Patrick%27s_blue</a>
This is cretinous. There's a well defined colour in between blue and green which is turquoise / cyan. It even says at the end "You see turquoise as x". No I don't, I see it as turquoise. It's like asking is the red or is this yellow without acknowledging the existence of orange. Either rage bait or pure idiocy.
This "test" makes no sense. Cyan, and especially turquoise are neither blue nor green, they are a mix (similar to orange between red / yellow).<p>I had actually a very hard time to answer the questions, needed to overlay most of the color with some mostly white / light gray window and only squint at the color around it to decide. In the end my result was 176, which is almost the exact turning point for most people (and that even while my monitor is set to be more cold than default; but like said I had whatever my monitor shows as "white" to compare; even <i>that</i> "white" is likely <i>technically</i> slightly blue-ish).<p>Color perception is anyway much more influenced by contrasts then anything else. (Likely similar to acoustic tones, which are very hard to name / locate absolutely than when comparing to some reference tone.)<p>Besides the things mentioned in the about popup, blue is AFAIK the color we have the most receptors for. So it's imho quite "natural" that most people perceive cyan—which is technically the exact middle—as blue-ish, and of course the color left to it, turquoise, is green-ish (and as it seems, for most people, the mentioned turning point).
My numbers kept varying wildly from 174 to 189, in the same patterns across multiple devices (initial number different from stable next-five results), so I tried a few things.<p>First I shifted the app to use P3 `oklch(.7066 .1611 $hue)` with range (150..210) centered on cyan at 180°, same as sRGB. No change, so it's not some sort of artifact of colorspaces. Then I upped it to 16 steps instead of 8. The window narrowed slightly, but the same first-then-the-rest shift kept happening. Finally I raised the random color static mask duration from 200ms to 5000ms. Scored 180 +/- 1. Huh. Makes sense, given the image persistence stuff I deal with.<p>So, for those seeing that same variability I'd recommend editing that first (local response override index-blah.js, search `, 200` replace `, 5000` by hand, reload page) to get a more stable result.
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".<p>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 <i>Or</i> blue . Then kinda bobbled the guess<p>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.
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.<p>I would also trust the results more if it bounced you around a bit randomly rather than tried to center you in. It gets to a point where I don't really have confidence and I suspect the environment around me contributed a fair amount at that point.<p>Seem to get ~172.
I feel the same way, after the first couple of responses, I was just thinking it's blue-green. So I just had to pick randomly.<p>A better interface would have been to just show the final spectrum pic and slide to where you think the separation is.
Cool to see this experiment crowdsourced.<p>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.<p><a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/412264/through-the-language-glass-by-guy-deutscher/9780099505570" rel="nofollow">https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/412264/through-the-language-...</a>
There are colors in between blue and green that are neither blue nor green!
This is great!<p>Somewhat similar to a site I made a while ago, but for more "perception boundary" colors: <a href="https://theleo.zone/colorcontroversy/" rel="nofollow">https://theleo.zone/colorcontroversy/</a>
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.
I always wanted to have a color calibrator and a few years back i bought one.<p>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.<p>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.
Ambient light color would play a bigger part, with modern displays being fairly good.
Reminds me of the discussions with my wife. She is from Japan and, over there, you cross a traffic light when it's "blue". IIRC, the word was chosen before international agreements, and the colour has shifted towards green since, but it's still more blueish than in other countries. And they still call it "blue".
It is mentioned on the about page but I still feel like pointing out that your response to this test has as much to do with your perception of colors as how green or blue your screen is and what kind of ambient lighting there is. Especially considering how subtle the differences are in the final rounds of the test.<p>Still an interesting experiment, but I would be cautious about drawing conclusions about anything from it.
I think this site is doing a binary search, so that you narrow down on a boundary.<p>It would be much funnier, and also more insightful, if it didn't do this and let you contradict yourself.
This is obviously 青.
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.<p>Also, I found that sometimes it looked like there were two colors. The top was green and bottom was blue. Maybe my monitor?
This is flawed. Turquoise is not blue or green. Also different displays will show different colors. And a lot of displays aren’t great at producing the hues in the green color space. Idk the test seems arbitrary, but I’m not color expert
I'm not sure what's going on, but in Chrome my median point is heavily on the blue side but in Safari it's on the Green side. Also, at least in Safari, reset leads to a series of perceptually unchanging turquois screens -- it seems a bug. Refreshing fixes it for the next run.
"Your boundary is at hue 181, bluer than 87% of the population.<p>For you, turquoise is green."<p>Took it 3 times (90%, 85%, 87%). At least, I now know why sometimes I'm surprised that people call green things blue :)<p>To be honest, there should have been a "neither" category, because that was frustrating to classify a color that is clearly neither. But I understand the need for a binary choice for this experiment.<p>Turquoise `#40E0D0 ` feels green to me, while Dark Turquoise `#00CED1` , I can agree to consider as blue.
hue 174, "true median" .-.
Your monitor model, screen settings, .. play a significant role in here. Try it on different screens to get different results.
This is like one of those eye tests where they switch between lenses narrowing in on the prescription. The question is really what shades of turquoise is more blue than green.<p>I got 80 which is close enough, I think it’s really only the extremes that are meaningful. I tried simply alternating green-blue etc and got 60. I think adding some randomness and taking more samples (more questions) would help - I was worried that the prior color left a residual effect as a relative comparison was easier than absolute comparison. The extra random samples could help give an idea of confidence in that middle zone.
Interesting!<p>I have UV filters on my glasses and things really changed when I took them on of off. I was much greener with the UV filtering glasses on. I guess my eyes are not picking up on things somehow.
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.
My suggestion is always to look at what colors people think "go together". A Westerner looking at a Chinese temple will say "ugh, saturated red, light blue, and gold, all together?" My own self looking at a shirt my Eastern European wife loves: "dark blue, gray, and orange, bleah". It suggests that depending on your culture, you may have adopted a different visual response, where blood color is harmonious with sky color, or something like that.
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.<p>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”.
Quite right: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia</a>
I've got an anecdote that says that they <i>don't</i>.<p>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.
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?”
I find that fascinating as well! I hope tech will give us the answer in our lifetimes.
I came back as with a measure of 174 and a label of "true neutral".<p>However, I know enough about perception to know that this called for some hacking.<p>So as soon as I saw the second color I realized I needed to look at something else. So each time after choosing and seeing the next color I looked around quite a bit, inside and through the windows at the outside (I happen to be in a Hawaii, so blues and greens are abundant) before choosing and I noticed significantly different color perception after looking around, specifically, I had more confidence in whether it was blue or green.<p>I can imagine if you just stare at the colors and try to power through, you might get kinda irritated.
I also got 174. I turned the brightness up on my phone (to about 65-70%) before starting, but that was it. No resetting my eyes between colors. Considering I’m red/green colorblind, and certain hues of green I see as gray, I’m pretty shocked by the result. I suspect having a binary choice helped a lot, as once it was no longer something I could consider blue, I’d call it green.
I've got a color question that I need some opinions on:<p>When I look at the green/blue boundary region on an HSV color wheel like the ones in this S/O thread [0], it appears as a white un-saturated region.<p>If I look at similar layouts in other colorspaces (e.g., something perceptually uniform like Lab) I don't generally see this white patch.<p>My question is:
- I'm colorblind. Do other people also see a white patch there?
- If this is a genuine problem with HSV, is there an explanation for why there's a hue angle that is unsaruated regardless of S value?<p>[0] <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62531754/how-to-draw-a-hsv-color-wheel-using-matplotlib" rel="nofollow">https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62531754/how-to-draw-a-h...</a>
The boundary regions at 3:00, 7:00, and 11:00 are composite colors that have ~2x the brightness compared to the primary colors of red, green, and blue. For someone without a color vision deficiency, they appear brighter than surrounding colors, but the saturation really only varies with distance from the center. For example, to me, the point at 3:00 on the edge of the circle is the peak of a "ridge" in brightness, but appears as a very saturated teal.<p>I have a colorblindness simulator on my computer called Sim Daltonism and when I use that on the color wheel, it does indeed appear to have white, desaturated lines radiating from the center at those three angles. In the simulator, the one at 11:00 is the strongest, followed by 3:00, and the 7:00 one is faintest. My hunch is that the perceptually uniform color space samples you're looking at have more uniform brightness, so those boundaries blend in to the surrounding colors better. They look nicer to me too -- they still represent saturated, composite colors like teal, but just at a pleasant, harmonious brightness. It's very interesting to compare perception!
Don’t use hsv color wheel to intuit color space. CIE x,y $year_standard is superior to view color space and understand the tricolor values Z = f(X,Y) in every way.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space</a><p>I think the bands you’re referring to are an artifact.
I’m not color blind and see a white barrier between 3 sections(it looks like a 3 piece pie) with lines at the green/blue red/blue and green/yellow boundaries.<p>No idea why
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?
Just last week I called something blue and my daughter objected; she said it was green. After discussion we both agreed it was was teal and she said roughly "but teal is a shade of green." To me Teal is a (admittedly greenish) shade of blue.
In Korean, we have an adjective "푸르다". It is somewhere between blue and green. You can say trees are that, oceans are that. It also means unripe.<p>Yeah, so to me, tortoise is definitely blue.<p>Edit: typo tortoise -> turquoise
Curious how this looks for red/green colorblind folks?<p>Do they see everything beyond the initial green as a shade of blue?<p>--Edit--<p>My red/green colorblind father just got back me with this result:<p>> Your boundary is at hue 175, bluer than 68% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.
> Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.
I did it twice. The first time, I was bluer than 57% the second time I was greener than 63%.
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.<p>Practical ramifications:
* Some of my 'black' shirts are blue when it's sunny
* Popular desktop themes (solarized dark) have text that is completely unreadable
I'm at 87%. How would you classify Turquoise (`#40e0d0`) and Dark Turqoise (`#00CED1`)?
Same here at 82%, although I don’t think I’m seeing blues as black.
I think your monitor or room lighting might just be different from others'
This is also going to be very difficult because:<p>* HDR vs SDR mode<p>* Different monitors have different color replication ranges<p>* Monitor and OS color and brightness controls (brightness affects color perception)<p>* Interior lighting<p>* Monitor technology (LCD, OLED, etc)<p>Meaning even if a color was <i>meant</i> to be X, it just won't appear that way given the combinations above.
Related:<p><i>Is My Blue Your Blue?</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41430258">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41430258</a> - Sept 2024 (527 comments)
Showing the completion screen and giving the ability to use a slider to pick the center might be more useful.
The hot debate in my house: is it yellow or green. Is there a test for that?
They're all xanh to me.
I must be colourblind, most of those look the same on my phone.
Same. There were like three different colors at first and then the remainder looked mostly the same.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
One of my eyes sees (very) slightly greener than the other one.<p>But with both eyes I got<p>> Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.<p>I should test with one eye.
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."
>> Your boundary is at hue 177, bluer than 76% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.<p>Not really sure how to interpret this. Where is "normal" on the curve?
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.
The About section at the end said most people average around 175.
Some languages don’t make a distinction. And if a language doesn’t have a word for green or blue it won’t have a word for brown or orange either.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...</a>
Noticing on my monitor that it's more blue if I tiptoe and look down, and it's obviously green when looking at below.<p>I think a better way to standardize this without too much variance in color would be make the user denote on the screen where they are actually looking perpendicular to the screen and judge from that area.
Very relevant complementary reading:
<a href="https://empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of-the-world-how-we-gave-colors-names-and-it-messed-with-our-brains-part-i/" rel="nofollow">https://empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of...</a>
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.
This is really great. Love the chart at the end. Apparently I evaluate heavily toward thinking green is blue.
It just keeps showing me the same color over and over.
Asinine and meaningless. Forces a classification on something that obviously anyone with fully-functioning colour vision will classify as "aquamarine" or "turquoise" or etc.<p>This has nothing at all to do with colour perception, or, if actual differences in perception are involved, this test fails to distinguish those from individual differences in assignment to linguistic categories.<p>EDIT: To actually test something like this, you need to make an assumption that cannot easily be tested or supported by evidence.<p>E.g. say we could all agree that, generally, blue + orange is a more pleasant pairing than blue + green. One might then imagine a series of images using orange + varying interpolations between blue and green, with the prompt being "is this combination of colours more or less aesthetically pleasing than the last". The average cutpoint could <i>then</i> be interpreted as a subjective judgement of where e.g. teals become "more blue", from an aesthetic / complementary standpoint. But this test does nothing of the sort.
The test's gradient does not have even luminence/saturation.<p>It needs to interpolate between blue and green in the CIELAB color space.
I wouldn't call most of those colors green or blue. Most of them looked identical to me as well. I ended up picking arbitrarily for all but the two I thought were distinctly one or the other.
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.
Warm blue vs cool blue is another interesting social question: <a href="https://www.ducktyped.org/p/a-colorful-controversy" rel="nofollow">https://www.ducktyped.org/p/a-colorful-controversy</a>
turquoise is green.
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.
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.
>> Your boundary is at hue 173, greener than 57% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.<p>very subtle changes in color after the first two. it also seems to be repeating blue -> green -> blue -> green, for me atleast.
While neat, I don't get consistent scores if I retry it a few times. If it leads with a series of greens first, my score is more green oriented, and vice versa.
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.
My mind was blown once when I heard multiple people calling yellow Gatorade (lemon lime) green. I have no clue how anyone perceives it that way.
I used to own a house in California which I swore was peach, my coworker told me face it the house is pink.
"teal" is the name for color "Moderate bluish green"<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teal" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teal</a>
> Your boundary is at hue 181, bluer than 87% of the population. For you, turquoise is green.<p>Pretty sure I accidentally picked blue for a green once.
Would be cool to see a gender distribution. Women perceive more colours than men, wonder how it impacts this.
crowd sourced perception research. Love it, OP.
It looks like this project got forked and updated further <a href="https://ismycolor.com/" rel="nofollow">https://ismycolor.com/</a>
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.
If you're not colorblind, yes. More or less.<p>Not much sense for the evolutionary machinery to keep the whole backend the same, but diverge in the perception part.
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.
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.
Im left delighted to find out something new, but left wanting to know how to use it.<p>Like if im 75% on the green transition, how do i use this information.
Also no way to account for the variation of LCD displays. The same "colour" can look different on two different panels
Showed me teal but only have options for blue and green. Teal ain't either.
> Your boundary is at hue 172, greener than 63% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.<p>isn't turquoise exactly (50%) between the two?
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.
The xkcd color survey[1] was 16 years ago now. With the data available, there were various follow-ups. Many, including xkcd's own "take it for fun <i>here</i>" link there in [1], are now 404. But the strata[2] and word cloud[3] are still up, and relevant here.<p>The data remains available. It was a TidyTuesday ("social data project") for 2025-07-08.[4] This response[5] looked at TFA. (This week's TT is ag tariffs.[9])<p>I just did a quick and sloppy search, so there's likely more out there. Curiously, I found AIMode and Bing/chat less immediately helpful than I'd have guessed.<p>Years ago I used the xkcd data for a prototype web interactive for kids, which shader filtered video to selected colors... but it was overlapping rather than a partition, and I'd never leave out cyan. Hmm, maybe a vibe coding target.<p>[1] <a href="https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.datapointed.net/2010/06/xkcd-color-name-strata/" rel="nofollow">https://www.datapointed.net/2010/06/xkcd-color-name-strata/</a>
[3] <a href="https://luminoso.com/the-color-cloud-an-interactive-visualization-of-color-names/" rel="nofollow">https://luminoso.com/the-color-cloud-an-interactive-visualiz...</a>
[4] <a href="https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/blob/main/data/2025/2025-07-08/readme.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/blob/main/dat...</a>
[5] <a href="https://jofrhwld.github.io/blog/posts/2025/07/2025-07-09_color-survey/" rel="nofollow">https://jofrhwld.github.io/blog/posts/2025/07/2025-07-09_col...</a>
Off topic: [9] <a href="https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/blob/main/data/2026/2026-04-28/readme.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/blob/main/dat...</a>
After 4 clicks, I can no longer decide whether it is green or blue. I would pick "neither" if it were offered
Can we get this with more different colors.<p>Like forest green olive green. navy blue.<p>Also maybe the full color spectrum. And a select set of colors to pick from.
Fun. Are you accepting PRs? I would love to add a “share” button that shares the color I landed on
I want this but for blue vs. purple.
almost got fooled by blue being green or vice versa. nice experiment!
In France turquoise is historically called “bleu turquoise”, so French people would definitely categorize the in-between as blue.
> Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.
Tried it on two displays, one I’m 82% green, the other I’m 75% blue.
For some reason, dragging the window makes the chart re-animate.
Also needs a button "this is both" for colors like cyan
>"Your boundary is at hue 187, bluer than 97% of the population. For you, turquoise is green"<p>Problem is that it asks to categorize colors that to me are neither blue nor green
Man doesn’t understand teal the website
Wow. Did anyone else have some serious trouble with this?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
cyan is neither blue nor green
I wonder how much of this is testing people's eyes/brains, and how much is testing their screens.
See also: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea</a>
I think things are green that other people think are grey. Never heard of that with anyone else.
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.<p>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.
Pro tip, I had my device's blue light filter enabled.<p>I want to say that shifted my score a lot. But every time I play I get a pretty different score, even on the same screen calibration. So, uh...
always blue
I just took it to mean is this more blue or green rather than literally blue or green. Correct answer is then 180, anything else is clearly a fail :)
I got hue 175 twice, but bluer than 66% of the population once and 59% the second time.
Midori
This assumes that the person you're testing isn't aware of the whole category of colors that sit between green and blue?<p>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.
This is cyan!
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.<p>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. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-photo_blue" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-photo_blue</a>
I enjoyed this more than I should lol