The Dress – over 73 million page views on the original Tumblr post and 480,000+ notes after just 2.5 days. Why is there all this fuss about the color of that dress? As reported by almost every social media outlet on the planet, some see white and gold and others see blue and black. It just shows us how funny the human brain can be. Somehow the picture of that dress destroys the brain’s ability to discern between colors.
I saw one post that said, “It is a collision of color, illumination, and reflection.” I thought it was very interesting that “illumination” was used to describe this phenomenon. What I found, doing a little old fashioned research, is that it’s very easy (especially in photographs) to change the perceived color of an object by changing the illumination.
The Science Behind the Dress
So, according to the experts, here is the abridged version of how this can happen. Light enters your eye in wavelengths. Wavelengths correspond to different colors. These light waves are distributed to your visual cortex and processed into an image.
As with most things in life, timing is everything. The first burst of light to enter your eye consists of wavelengths that are illuminating your view and reflecting off the object you are looking at. At this point your brain essentially tries to figure out what color the reflecting light is and removes it from its interpretation of the real color of the object.
And this brings us to the confusing result that erupted social media. Some of us looking at the picture interpreted blue as the reflecting color which resulted in the white and gold dress. Others interpreted gold as the reflecting color and saw the blue and black dress. Because this is a result of the first bursts of light to enter your eye, we have no control over how or when this happens.
So, white and gold or blue and black? On separate occasions, I was able to see the same image both ways. I guess this reminds me of the old adage, “looks can be deceiving.”
The Dress Color & X-ray Image Interpretation
I can’t help but wonder if this collision of color, illumination, and reflection might affect the interpretation of those items brought through security checkpoints. After all, a security screener using a conventional X-ray system uses color to assist with identifying prohibited articles.
Material discrimination using colors is a very common feature of most X-ray machines. Various shades of green, orange, and blue are used to represent the atomic make up and density of objects.
Is it possible the same conditions that fueled the dress controversy might affect how one screener views the colors in an X-ray image versus another screener? Is it possible that a screener might remove the wrong color from the view and allow a potentially dangerous item to pass the checkpoint?
If it is at all possible then we should encourage our security screeners not to completely rely on material discrimination, using colors, to interpret X-ray images. To provide checks and balances, using shape and positioning along with material discrimination would be best for X-ray image interpretation.
What do you think? Let us know with comments below.
