The Science Behind That Dress

A photo of a striped dress is dividing the Internet - and offices and couples - and some people think it's black and blue, and others see it as white and gold. Wired's Adam Rogers explains that it's basically an optical illusion. "There's something about the lighting in the photograph," he says, and that it's an "artifact of the way our brains and our eyes have evolved to see color vision...we don't just see the color of an object, we see the color of the light around that object reflecting off the object." 

Adam Rogers goes on:

"We grew up as a species in a world lit by daylight, which is a light across the spectrum...but it does change over the course of a day...from dawn pink to bright white blue at noon to twilight pink. Our brains have learned over evolutionary time to subtract the color of the light of what we're looking at."

"But when there's an image where we are unsure - when the cues make us unsure about what color light we should be subtracting, then our brains - without us being in control of it in any way - make a decision to tell us what color something is. And something about the lighting in this particular image...is making some people take a guess that they should eliminate the magic hour light of late afternoon, and some people take a guess that they should eliminate noontime light. And those two guesses give you the two color interpretations." 

For what it's worth - Brian and four others on the team here see it as black and blue -- and two see white and gold.