What can eye-tracking tell us about #TheDress?
Using eye-tracking technology, Lumen Research explains the #TheDress phenomenon that has taken social media by storm.
You must have seen it, and if you haven’t – you’ve almost definitely heard of it. Last night, Tumblr user Swike uploaded the image (pictured below) with the question, “What colour is this dress?” and the internet exploded.
White and gold, or blue and black?
What eye-tracking can tell us
Eye tracking research from Lumen suggests an interesting reason why some people might see ‘the dress’ as one colour, and others in another light.
Lumen tested today’s internet sensation to see if their eye movements revealed the what makes some people Team Blue and Black and others Team White and Gold.
We decided to test the dress using our eye-tracking software, to work out whether people see the dress differently based on where they first look on the image. Here’s what we found:
Team Blue and Black
60% of people looked at the “blue” first for 1.7 seconds
And 70% looked at the “black” detail for 0.8 seconds.
Team White and Gold
100% Looked at the “blue” area for 0.9 seconds
73% looked at the “black” detail for 1 second.
So what colour is it anyway?
The question prompted a mixed bag of responses online, with several people seeing the dress as white and gold, while other users argued it was black and blue.
The real colour of the dress, as this photo from Roman, the seller for the dress shows, is that it is in fact blue and black.
Why do people see it differently?
According to Ben Conway, neuroscientist (and probable colour enthusiast) human beings have evolved to see in daylight, however the light at different times of day varies massively. (E.g. From pink of dawn, to blue of noon, to reddish twilight).
Conway says the cause of confusion comes from the “Visual system becoming confused and trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis. People will either discount the blue side (end up seeing white and gold) or discount the gold side (end up seeing black and blue).”
“Chromatic adaption” – Is one aspect of vision that can fool people into observing a colour-based optical illusion, such as the “same colour illusion.”
It’s thought that the human visual system generally does maintain constant perceived colour under different lighting. However, at some light levels, there are situations where the relative brightness of two different stimuli will become reversed at different illuminance levels. This is what we think is occurring here.
The research was conducted on Friday 27 February at Lumen’s offices in London, amongst a randomly selected sample of 20 respondents.