I suspect it tests your monitor and monitor calibration as much as your color perception. In particular, sRGB displays have a pretty severely limited green gamut. If you have a wide-gamut display, the test is probably gonna appear different.
But another problem is with displaying the colors essentially full-window, which is going to be nearly-full-screen for many users. When we're staring at a screen with a particular tint, our eyes quickly do "auto white balance" that skews the results. It's the mechanism behind a bunch of optical illusions.
To address that last problem, I think the color display area should be much smaller, or you should be shown all hues at once and asked to position a cut-off point.
Author here, yes, it tests a mix of your monitor calibration and colour naming. The two types of inferences you can make with this are:
1. If two people take the test with the same device, in the same lighting (e.g. in the same room), their relative thresholds should be fairly stable.
2. If you average over large populations, you can estimate population thresholds, marginalizing over monitor calibrations.
The most interesting thing for me is that while cyan (#00ffff) is nominally halfway between blue and green, most people's thresholds, averaged over monitor calibrations, imply that cyan is classified as blue. I was not expecting that the median threshold (hue 174) would be so deep into the greens.
I got hue 174 as my threshold and really I just wanted to say "neither, this is turquoise/teal" for most of the questions. But blue/green was the only option.
I got hue 175. It's interesting to note that some older cultures, Japan for example, didn't always have separate words for blue and green, both were the same color ("ao" in Japanese). You can see the effects of this even today with things like traffic lights in Japan, which are considered "green" by their standards but blue by many others' standards.
There are also other cultures, such as Russia, where light blue / dark blue (simplification) are effectively considered separate colors.
All this to say, personally, I think we will continue to evolve to recognize more distinct "colors" such as teal, which is neither blue nor green but somewhere between. A lot of this recognition power is rooted in linguistics and culture, it's not as strictly biological as one might think.
Thanks for this comment! I dabble in fountain pens a bit, and one of my favorite inks is "ao" by Taccia.
Now it all makes sense (tho, to my eye it's kind of a blurple–royal blue; I get no green or teal from it. But, now I'm tempted to go do a blotter of it and look at it extra carefully in natural light.)
In Russian light blue is “blue” and dark blue is “indigo” essentially. It still has seven colors in the rainbow. It’s just that in English colloquially nobody uses indigo.
Yes, well that's what I mean. Culturally, Russians think and speak about colors differently, dividing them up differently than the West.
> Russian does not have a single word referring to the whole range of colors denoted by the English term "blue". Instead, it traditionally treats light blue (голубой, goluboy) as a separate color independent from plain or dark blue (синий, siniy), with all seven "basic" colors of the spectrum (red–orange–yellow–green–голубой/goluboy (sky blue, light azure, but does not equal cyan)–синий/siniy ("true" deep blue, like synthetic ultramarine)–violet) while in English the light blues like azure and cyan are considered mere shades of "blue" and not different colors.
> Blue: plava (indicates any blue) and modra; in the eastern speaking areas modra indicates dark blue, in some of the western areas it may indicate any blue
I am not deeply knowledgeable on Russian, I failed Russian in high school, just going off of my surface-level knowledge of linguistic relativity regarding color, and discussions with a friend from that part of the world, so I might not know what I'm talking about here.
That’s a bit complicated. The difference between синий and голубой is not really a difference in hue, it’s a difference in brightness.
It tends to be true that hues tending towards green are perceived more brightly than hues tending towards red, which means that blues with more green in them are more likely to be голубой, but by virtue of the fact they are perceived to be brighter.
But in principle, the line is drawn horizontally on the colour chart (or at least diagonally), not vertically.
The color name question here doesn't have a clear answer because most of the respondents would call this "teal", "blue–green", "turqoise", "cyan", "aqua", or some similar name. You'd get somewhat similar results asking whether an orange (the fruit) is really "red" or "yellow", or whether an eggplant is really "blue" or "red".
An individual person's answers on this kind of question are likely to vary from day to day, are context dependent (i.e. whether one object or another appears more "green" or "blue" depends on what kind of object it is), and colors this intense are very sensitive to changes in eye adaptation and technical details of the display and software, as well as inter-observer metamerism.
So in addition to the color naming difficulties, it's not even a very good test of color naming, if you want to get reliable psychometric/linguistic data.
For a single individual, all of the above is true, but for a large enough sample size, the answers may be more generally useful because you account for all of those rounding errors.
No, because if my case holds more genera (and I suspect it does), the answers are in part out of sheer frustration, and therefore prone to being similar to the last one given.
I didn't exactly rage quit but did think it was silly.
I wouldn't describe teal as blue or green any more than I'd describe purple as red or blue, so being forced to pick felt silly. Like being forced to choose my seventh favorite Norwegian glacier - technically its a valid question but my answer is necessarily going to be arbitrary.
That’s like asking which way a Necker cube is oriented. It’s both and neither. For blue and green, there’s a range of shades for which that ambiguity is true and you can “flip” it in your mind.
I would actually find it more practical to determine the thresholds on both sides where I find it to become ambiguous.
Not as far as I can tell. The phrasing of the question test does not acknowledge such ambiguity to start with, and by forcing them to answer one way or the other the test does not allow the users to signal perceived ambiguity even if they wanted to.
So how could the point of this exercise possibly be to find the range of ambiguity?
Fun, I got 174 and when I saw the results my reaction was "but that is not turquoise!" which I suppose means I either don't know what turquoise is, or my screen has bad calibration/gamut.
I don't think those specs make a difference. You would need a wide gamut display and a hardware calibrator to be sure you were looking at the colour as it should be
That wasn't clearly part of the test. To be ultra-pedantic (this is HN after all), the user's choices don't say "This is more-blue-than-green" and "This is more-green-than-blue". The choices are only "This is green" and "This is blue" forcing you to just pick one, where there is no clearly correct choice. When the color on the screen is neither green nor blue, many people will just pick a random answer.
I bet if the choices actually said "This is more green than blue" the results would be different.
On such a random internet doodad most users will pick a random answer period. To see what this thingy tries to do without wasting any time on it. I hope it doesn't try to do gather any meaningful data.
Personally I "tried" to answer truthfully at first and then went absolutely "ok f u, don't care no more" when it showed turquoise :D
Taking how you behave, and extrapolating that it to everyone, (and furthermore being unable to accept that other people might behave differently), is not a winning strategy for life.
According to conversion rates and engagement metrics of most apps I've seen (not even mentioning social media where 2-3% engagement is the norm) most users are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Unless said app is a work/hobby tool, but that shouldn't be really called engagement.
Turqoise doesn't feel either more-green-than-blue or more-blue-than-green. It feels neither blue nor green, and I don't see any way to compare it to either.
It's clearly more turqoise than blue. Or green.
Turqoise on a computer monitor is always missing part of itself, so maybe I should've answered based on that, but I don't think the computer monitor was the point.
180 and blue and I suspect that language also plays a part (I was brought up in an environment where the word turquoise starts with green, but now live in a turquoise-producing state where the finished product look far blue-r.)
it looks like my default is if there is 40% green in that it is green. Thus it told me that turquoise for me is green. Which if I look at Turquoise the RGB color, that is green. If I look at Turquoise the mineral about half the time it is green and half the time blue.
Logically, a color, green etc., is a 'simple' notion and cannot be explained terms of anything simpler. With color we have to revert to a different description, here wavelength. But wavelength is not human perception (and we can't explain such perception in simpler terms).
(Yes in New York and Indiana, no in Massachusetts, and the law is silent elsewhere. Personally I believe that because the torta exists, the burrito may have some characteristics of a sandwich but should be considered a wrap)
I'd love a last step in the test where you're presented with the gradient, but before showing the distribution and the user's score. Allow the user to select where they consider their threshold, then display the final results.
A sorting interface would be another neat step! And yeah, I think most would gravitate toward the middle. Seeing how "far off" you are would be fun :)
Ooh maybe have the user slide a gradient left and right inside a window, aligning the center of the window with where they think the line is between blue and green (i.e., instruct the user to fill the window with equal amounts of green and blue).
It tells me to rotate my device, implying it should work on my phone, but I can't figure out how to move the colors. Holding and sliding doesn't work. Tapping doesn't seem to do anything.
> The most interesting thing for me is that while cyan (#00ffff) is nominally halfway between blue and green, most people's thresholds, averaged over monitor calibrations, imply that cyan is classified as blue.
Perceptually (that is, in CIE-LCh color space, for example), the hue component of #00ffff is a lot cloer to #00ff00 than it is to #0000ff. But the website doesn't ask which color is closer, it asks if it's "green" or "blue". And how we use those words has more to do with culture than with perception. We also call the color of a clear afternoon sky "blue", even though that is perceptually extremely far away from #0000ff.
> while cyan (#00ffff) is nominally halfway between blue and green, most people's thresholds, averaged over monitor calibrations, imply that cyan is classified as blue
Yes, because (at least for me) the thought went "well that's cyan, it's not really blue but if forced to pick, cyan is more like blue so I'll click that". It's like rounding up at 0.5.
>For me, if forced to pick between two choices that were not correct, I'd just pick one randomly. I think this is a wording problem more than anything.
That's what I'd do if I were being paid to take the survey. Instead I just closed the window as soon as it popped up cyan and only gave me blue and green as options.
But, before digital color displays became popular, the average person had, by far, mostly exposure to subtractive (paint) colors.
US school children are taught from birth that the primary subtractive colors are red, yellow, and blue, simply because those words are easier to pronounce, and so magenta is a weird "red" and cyan is a weird "blue" , until the children discover on their own, or in specialized print/paint schools, red and blue are not primary subtractive colors.
Humans are terrible at naming things.
And to bring it back to Current Thing:
Google AI cites this source for its red/yellow/blue claim, even though explicitly this source says that Google gives the wrong answer.
I mean, I was taught in grade school that George Washington cut down a cherry tree and then said he couldn't tell a lie. That didn't make it true.
I would hope that here on HN, people are aware of RGB primaries, and then maybe CMYK. Saying that cyan is "not primary or secondary" is just wrong. Even Wikipedia explains in the first paragraph that the RYB model has a "lack of scientific basis":
By the way, "cyan" is a very poor name to use for #00ffff. The term "cyan" refers to the kind of slightly greenish blue used in 4-color printing (CMYK), and was just a Greek word for "blue" chosen to be a jargon word to avoid confusion with the English color name. It has a totally different color than the equal mixture of typical G and B primaries in a computer display.
Similarly, "magenta" is a poor name to use for #ff00ff. The term "magenta" is a jargon word for the slightly purplish printer's red, which was chosen to avoid confusion with the English word "red". It has a completely different than the equal mix of RGB R and B primaries.
("Red", "green", and "blue" are also very poor names for the RGB primaries, which are substantially orangish red, yellowish green, and purplish blue.)
OP have you considered doing a version for this to test contemporary Greek native speakers, vs others ("control" group),
for differentiation of blues?
I remember reading that modern Greek has two color-names for sky- and dark- blue (not sure what the prototypes are for each nor if they have hue components, maybe the "sky" blue is green-shifted?)... always been fascinated by the discussion of "weak Sapir-Whorf" around this and would be quite interested to see if there are any differences in discrimination...
The classic cognitive/perceptual psyche data to gather would be time-to-discriminate, with the prediction being that Greek speakers make faster judgement because they have higher/faster discrimination, than others.
Not sure how you'd pose the question to non-Greek speakers tho :)
I checked in at hue 174, the median, which is interesting to me as I know that my wife will test to a very different hue as we have occasional disagreements on whether something is 'blue' or 'green' :)
It is interesting to test people at just one device.
I used my phone on a mount, and completed the test with my wife, children and myself - I was interested (though not surprised) what an outlier I was, as I am colour blind in various combinations, but though my wife scored 'bang in the middle' - it was interesting that wasn't common.
My kids were both to the left of the scale fwiw - I was further right than 98% of people.
> 2. If you average over large populations, you can estimate population thresholds, marginalizing over monitor calibrations.
This might be one case where it might make sense to cluster between the reported operating system. At the moment I only have a family of Macs to test, but I can imagine that Windows users with their different default gamma get back different results.
> I was not expecting that the median threshold (hue 174) would be so deep into the greens.
You're not asking gender of the test taker. Your results will be skewed because you're probably getting more men than women. Women in general have more ability to detect green vs blue.
Even more fundamentally, red-green colorblindness is a recessive trait on the X chromosome, thereby affecting biological males in far greater number than females.
It could be a high enough percentage to make the results from this site noticeably different between the sexes.
Not that surprising. To most people, pure RGB-blue looks a bit violet. People are used to ink (subtractive) blue more than light (additive) blue. People call the sky blue and water blue; both are closer to cyan. Most people think of a neutral blue as something like #0080ff.
I classified cyan as green because, well, it's greener than pure blue, and it's also the most greener you can get than blue, in RGB space, without losing any blue :)
>most people's thresholds, averaged over monitor calibrations, imply that cyan is classified as blue.
I think that's just to your test forcing people to pick either blue or green even though cyan is both, they are just going to pick blue because it's the first option and more likely to be picked randomly.
Color vision theory is far too complicated to discuss here, and I'm not going to debate cyan as a mixed color of blue and green wavelengths versus a fixed wavelength that's in between both of them.
What the author provided was, at best, misleading but nonsense as far as science is concerned.
If the author said he was an artist and presented colors as a preferential list it would have been a different matter.
BTW, I don't mind being voted down (it happens to me regularly), but here those who did are only showing their ignorance. I'd add the author—who penned here—ought to explain his actions in much more detail.
Not to be mean, but I think every assertion in your comment is wrong.
Blue and Green are English words which sometimes describe primary or secondary colors additive colors. Cyan is (an English word that describes) a primary subtractive color.
Colors are not English words. They're physical reactions inside our eye-brain systems, affected by varying wavelengths of light. (Actually that's not the most accurate description of color either, but it's a more useful model.)
Not necessarily because the ambient light would affect the screen shows (it's emissive, not reflective) but because the brain also does "auto white/colour balance".
For a fun experiment, get your hand on some heavily yellow-tinted party glasses, go outside on a clear day with a bright blue sky.
When you put them on everything will be stark yellow tinged (and the blue sky will be completely off, like green or pink, can't recall which) but after a little while going on your business, perception adjusts and only a much less dramatic yellowish veil is in effect. You'd look at the sky and see almost-blue.
The kicker is when you remove the glasses: the sky will suddenly be of a glorious pink! (or green, can't recall) Only moments later it'll adjust back to be blue.
A certain wavelength may be absolute blue of a certain kind, but the perceptual system is all relative: "wait, I know this sky should be blue because that's what I've always seen, so let's compensate".
The same kind of effect - although less dramatic - can be achieved with lights that can be adjusted from say 2400K to 6500K and having as reference an object that is known "pure white", like a A4/letter sheet of paper.
This effect, in turn, adjusts how "absolutely displayed" colours are identified by way of biasing the whole perceptive system. AIUI that's the rationale behind Apple's True Tone thingy, aiming to compensate for that.
So the result of this test should be somewhat different depending on ambient lighting temperature.
Digital cameras also do automatic white balance (between yellow and blue) to mimic the automatic white balance of our eye/brain. If cameras didn't do white balance, outdoor photos with sunlight during noon would look extremely blueish, or indoor photos with artificial light would look extremely yellowish.
I like this illustration of how strong our natural white balance is:
During some heavy dust clouds from nearby wildfires, the sky was a deep and unsettling yellow. However, I couldn’t get a picture of it, because the automatic color balance removed the yellow overcast altogether.
The same problem occurs with photographing the yellow sky when dust from a Sahara sandstorm (presumably coming across the strait of Gibraltar) blows over Europe every few years. But you can set the white balance manually in the camera.
> AIUI that's the rationale behind Apple's True Tone thingy, aiming to compensate for that.
No idea what "AUIU" is, but yes, generally displays should do automatic white balance like iPhones do. I don't know why most Android phones don't seem to do it (pretty sure mine doesn't), and generally TVs/monitors also don't do it. (The required color temperature sensor can't be that expensive?)
> I don't know why most Android phones don't seem to do it (pretty sure mine doesn't), and generally TVs/monitors also don't do it.
The rageguy one would say either patents or "whoa the colors really pop I want that shut up here's my $$$" uncancellable LOOKATMEIAMTHESHINY mall mode, but via Occam'r razor I think mostly because they (manufacturers) simply don't care (about consumers, or about making a good product at all)
TVs/monitors (or laptops even, and more phones that you'd believe) with just a simple auto-brightness are stupendously rare even though Apple does it since forever and a half ago.
Yeah, laptops and TVs not even doing automatic brightness is even more absurd. Though Android phones have automatic brightness since forever, so why do many not have automatic color temperature (white balance)? The color temperature sensor can't be much more expensive than a brightness sensor. It's logically just an RGB brightness sensor.
Android does have a night mode which changes the white balance of the screen at sunset and sunrise, but this is just a binary thing and doesn't respond to actual ambient light.
At least I know that cartoon. But generally people strongly overestimate how many people know various abbreviations. For years I didn't care to look up what "IANAL" means. I since have forgotten it again.
Also deliberate software blue light filters. Mine is always on, both on the desktop and on the phone. Many people may forget that they are even using one.
This is pretty much the same way that a calibrator works (if you have ever watched a color calibrator running, you know what I mean), but a calibrator doesn't get biased, like the human eye.
In order for it to be a true "neutral" test, each test would need to be preceded by a "palate-cleanser" gray screen, or something, and there would probably need to be a neutral border.
> you should be shown all hues at once and asked to position a cut-off point.
This is actually the way I have seen this stuff tested, before.
These sorts of tests also need to be done in controlled background lighting. Whether people are doing this in a dark room, in a sunny kitchen, or under green led lighting would be a greater factor than anything being tested.
>> These sorts of tests also need to be done in controlled background lighting. Whether people are doing this in a dark room, in a sunny kitchen, or under green led lighting would be a greater factor than anything being tested.
Whether its a dark room or sunny kitchen, i'm not sure whether Turquoise is ever going to be blue or green. The entire question seems more like wordplay.
I don't think that's necessary for an informal test. Human color perception is extremely good at compensating for that and modern screens are relatively uniform and uniform besides. Cultural differences like the person downthread saying they consider anything with the slightest hint of green to be "green" seem far more impactful.
I tried it twice, once on each of my two different monitors (a Dell S2817Q and Dell S2409W) made a few years apart and with completely different settings; and I got 175 on one and 174 on the other. So pretty close even given the difference.
Parent was a joke about the Costco fixed price hotdog.
UK Costco hotdogs are £1.50, which is not equal to $1.50, reflecting both its arbitrary nature and that UK purchasing power is weaker than the exchange rate would appear. (Computer books are a frequent offender here of having the same $ and £ prices)
That might be a language issue. In Danish it's common to use "turkis blå", i.e. turquoise blue. Then again, you can also use "turkis grøn", turquoise green.
Within the ISCC–NBS System of Color Designation Turqoise (#40E0D0) is classified as a brilliant bluish green. Turquoise blue (#00FFEF) is close to turquoise on the color wheel, but slightly more blue.
> To address that last problem, I think the color display area should be much smaller, or you should be shown all hues at once and asked to position a cut-off point.
If you're doing this on a phone, try holding your phone at arm's length and against a white background (such as the wall or ceiling) and doing the test that way. Assuming you have redshift/night mode disabled, I suspect you'll end up closer to the median.
> I suspect it tests your monitor and monitor calibration as much as your color perception. In particular, sRGB displays have a pretty severely limited green gamut. If you have a wide-gamut display, the test is probably gonna appear different.
I was initially running the test with redshift enabled and was getting 95% towards blue. After reading this comment, went and disabled the redshift and got a consistent 50% median.
I only realized after seeing your comment. As usual, when I turned it off to compare, the hue it shifted to looked super unnatural and I had to re-enable it.
I always forget how much white-balancing my vision does.
I did it on IPS laptop display and got 175. On my OLED phone I got 179. I am more in agreement with the phone results, but the turquoise on the phone looked even greener to me.
But another problem is with displaying the colors essentially full-window, which is going to be nearly-full-screen for many users. When we're staring at a screen with a particular tint, our eyes quickly do "auto white balance" that skews the results. It's the mechanism behind a bunch of optical illusions.
To address that last problem, I think the color display area should be much smaller, or you should be shown all hues at once and asked to position a cut-off point.