I think this would be more fun if it started out easier, but most importantly if it gave you some real world stats at the end, such as how you compare to others, or whether you're colorblind etc.
I wish this had a "I can't tell" option. A few of the really hard ones I got right, but I'd say it was more of a lucky guess than a genuine ability to discriminate the difference.
17 out of 20. Was super easy until #10 and I had to stop and think more carefully (which was actually my first mistake), and then I got #14 and #15 wrong. The score was about what I expected, though - would've been surprised if it was <15 correct.
I wonder how much of this would come down to screen calibration / color accuracy? If everything's consistently off in 1 direction I guess not much, but I would imagine certain shades might appear effectively the same on some cheaper screens?
This is from the creator of the ScienceClic YouTube channel [0]:
“As part of the next video, which will be out in a few weeks, l'd like to invite you to take part in an experiment about color perception. If you don't experience color blindness, l'd greatly appreciate it if you could take this test. Feel free to try it as many times as you like, think about it as a game!”
Would be interesting to get some basic analysis of my results. From a glance it appeared that the ones I missed (6) tended towards red. The low saturation ones and green ones I found to be easiest, but was there any actual significance of the distribution of my errors? Simply too small a set to say?
I got the same number wrong but I've passed every Ishihara test ever thrown at me. I did this test on a cheap mobile that's not calibrated, so it's anyone guess what its gamma and transfer curves are like.
One should only take such tests seriously if one's using a properly calibrated monitor and it's viewed under ideal viewing conditions.
Calibrating a monitor is intended to ensure that colors on your monitor closely match colors on an ideal reference monitor. That's not the same thing as ensuring that two different colors on the same monitor actually show up differently; that's a much looser quality standard, because even a badly mis-calibrated monitor may still show both colors as distinct wrong colors.
I would only expect poor calibration to break this test for colors near the edge of the display's gamut, or if there's a drastic-enough shift that the color space's lack of perceptual uniformity means a numerical difference that should have been visible ends up in a different part of the color space where that same numerical difference is not perceptible.
Well, I initially ran the test on my cheap vivo phone when I switched to my Motorola the difference was very noticeable, there's obvious color crushing/reduced visible color gamut on the vivo, they're like chalk and cheese when compared side by side.
BTW, I used to calibrate color grading equipment for the film processing industry and the controls were strict, 18% gray walls, D65 calibration sources, densitometric equipment, Ishihara tests for me, etc. so I'm well aware of the issues.
There is certainly also a device limitation. I would expect that with less than full 24 bits of color, some fields might just look the same and the results do not depend on your vision any more.
Let's say the device has a "24 bit color display".
What about eye protection color shifting? This limits the color space used could reduce the effective remaining bit depth.
Or maybe they do temporal dithering to get more bit depth? Or maybe the 24 bits are already achieved with temporal dithering?
It does not need to be a calibrated display, but a cheap tablet in sunlight will be worse than a color grading monitor in a reference environment.
I hope they also register the devices used and analyze the statistics on that.
What stood out a lot in this exercise is that when looking at, versus near a disc, its luminance (or maybe the color as well) is perceived as changing. Almost the same i have when staring at not too bright stars, they seem to disappear when staring directly on them.
And related, I once had an 'eye migrane'. During that half an hour, the figures of a clock disappeared the moment i looked at them.
I'm curious how the eye migraine is related. I had one many, many years ago. It was a smallish (palm at arm's length) oval in the center of my vision that looked like snow on an analog TV, accompanied by a feeling of overwhelmed by all the colors of the products on the shelves (I was in a grocery). It stuck around for about half an hour for me as well.
I've also had eye floaters which cause things to distort and can be hard to see through. For about 6 months I had a large one in the center of my left eye vision, which was a bit scary when I discovered I might not see a car reflected in my wing mirror.
I’ve had visual migraines ever since I started training hard with weights. Played sports in High School and never had one, but suddenly I’m doing CrossFit in my late 30s and an hour after a workout I get these sparkly jagged lines in my vision (both eyes!). It took a while to even be able to describe them, let alone figure out what they were. Thankfully there’s no pain and they clear up after a while, but I have noticed since this all started that I’m also a bit more sensitive to screen brightness. That HDR emoji article from the other day was kind of triggering.
The characteristic ‘jagged lines’ of aura is not at all related to the characteristic visual flashes of retinal detachment which an entirely different pathophysiology. Given that the advent of the flashes are new and related to exertion however it wouldn’t be unreasonable for the OP to keep a log of onset and duration and consider neurologist referral if they were to become more common with consideration for screening imaging as there are certain conditions related to exertion that can trigger aura
I doubt it. I’ve described the issue to multiple eye doctors, none of whom mentioned this. It’s literally a psychedelic looking jagged line in my vision (which I can see with either of my eyes closed, superimposed over my vision). I’d think if it were an eye issue directly it only affect one or the other (or if both, it would be discernible which one is flaring up).
During an episode I usually first notice it as it is entering my focal region and interfering with reading. Then it sort of moves across my field of vision until it’s in my peripheral, and then goes away altogether.
What i saw during the eye migraine when closing my eyes was jittery jagged short bright lines, together forming a half moon. When i looked that up on the internet back then, it was explained as symptoms of 'eye migraine' and i believe it is an inflammation of the visual nerve. The disappearing numbers on the clock were quite scary, that is why i remember.
I had visual migraines for years, and was thankful they weren't full-blown... until I started getting headaches that lasted 18+ hours (pretty sure they're migraines). Now I'm just thankful I don't have multi-day-long ones.
I've had it happen many times and it's usually followed by a regular headache. Quite terrifying the first few times it happened to me. Felt like I was losing my sight.
Spending the whole night gaming when I was younger would sometimes trigger it in the morning. Thanks to not having any more time for that, it hasn't happened in years.
Indeed the animated jitter in the meadow shown on Wikipedia is close to what i remember seeing. 'Cortical spreading depression' is said to be the cause.
Similar experience. What surprised me: sometimes the odd-one-out was really quick/easy to see, and other times it took much longer & I thought "at the end, they'll say all disks were the same color".
For some of the easier ones, I was surprised by how aggressively my brain was making what seemed like "close" colors stand out. Like it was mentally "highlighting" the odd one out. I thought that was cool, but eventually the later ones were hard enough that the effect went away, and I was much less confident in my choices, and I got 3 mistakes, all in the last five rounds.
The way your brain manipulates your vision 24/7, with no way to get around that, is truly crazy to me. There's all sorts of effects in your visual system like edge detection and certain types of stimulus suppression that it's crazy we even feel like reality is coherent.
I experienced this too. IIRC the brightness-sensitive rod cells are more concentrated in your peripheral vision while your central vision has more colour-sensitive cone cells. This makes the centre of your vision less sensitive to dim objects, so you can see them only while looking indirectly (and they "disappear" when staring at them)
Another related effect is flickering of badly designed lighting only in my peripheral vision. When looking directly at the lights they look fine, but when the lights are in my peripheral vision they appear to flash distractingly. I think the peripheral vision is optimised to detect fast changes/movements. At least, that makes sense based on evolution.
The flickering i see as well when looking near my ali express outdoor LED light strip, from the corner of my eyes. The sub-components of the PWM seem to emerge as well.
19/20. The first many were very obvious. I missed #14 and I think right around there I started to slow down because the differences were getting smaller. Looking away and then coming back helped, I think. It seemed like if you look at them too long, whichever circle you're looking at seems to shift color and it becomes really hard to discern the difference.
Interesting. I only got 15/20, and previously considered myself "above average" at colour distinction tests but based on other replies that's not an especially good score. I'll try again, going more carefully.
Ah, yes, 19/20 the second time (only the last one wrong).
The first time I kept my eyes fixed in the same place roughly in the middle which clearly wasn't a good idea. On the second attempt I glanced between each circle in turn, trying to discern the difference over two points in time rather than two points in space.
I have poor color discrimination, but excellent flicker detection (?). This last skill was discovered by the senior devs when I was doing GPU driver debug, and “we” were looking for an extremely transient high-refresh rate tile clear issue. The issue only occurred at 120Hz (or higher) refresh rate with solid clear color on a large screen, with nearly identical colors. About one 4x8 pixel tile every minute or so. That was a boring few days, let me tell you.
Your display might have a more serious gamma problem, because the contrast ratio there isn't horrible on the displays I've tried. Or maybe your display is just set too dim for your viewing conditions. The test probably does legitimately need the neutral grey background.
The dark-mode browser extension I use changes the text from black to white on that page, which I hadn't noticed wasn't the original text color until you pointed out the poor readability of the black text.
17 out of 20. good enough for me. actually, i wonder how many of the 17 were just lucky guesses haha! they mention data in the end screen, i wonder if it will be made public (so i can see where in the bell curve i sit)
How do I know my screen can display all of these correctly? I tried on three different screens, one of which I know is bad, and got 16, 16, 18. Is those two mistakes the error margin of the screen if my eyes are fine, or much more likely to be the error margin of my eyes?
For those reporting scores: please also report device type, like LCD/OLED, or which phone model if applicable. Tweakers.net has a large database of screen color measurements. As mentioned in e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43746400, it can make quite a difference
My 18 score was on an Oppo Reno8, the 16 score on the not-known-bad screen is some ~2008 display. On the former, Tweakers reports an average color error of 3.42 ΔE2000, 9.58 ΔEITP, or 2.60 ΔE2000 if white is excluded
The "blacklist" parameter prevents that you get the same challenge twice. Note also that it submits every answer to the server (fine imo, but I think it would be even nicer if this was mentioned on the page)
Happy to hear, though note the file is without l (lowercase L) in the end (I guess autocorrupt is to blame here?). Fun fact: if you remove the filename, it'll show you all the crap in that directory, listing this file as being last modified in 2015-09-27. If past performance is an indicator, it should be stable to use for the next ten years as well :D
Thanks for posting, I thought the same thing... my (useless data point of one) results showed 100% accuracy except the last four, which I thought "wow, I am just guessing now, can literally not see a difference".
123 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 220 ms ] threadAt the end it says I can play again, because it'll generate more data. But for what?
It'd be cool to see some stats, or learn a bit more about what I just did...
I wonder how much of this would come down to screen calibration / color accuracy? If everything's consistently off in 1 direction I guess not much, but I would imagine certain shades might appear effectively the same on some cheaper screens?
“As part of the next video, which will be out in a few weeks, l'd like to invite you to take part in an experiment about color perception. If you don't experience color blindness, l'd greatly appreciate it if you could take this test. Feel free to try it as many times as you like, think about it as a game!”
[0] https://youtube.com/@scienceclicen
One should only take such tests seriously if one's using a properly calibrated monitor and it's viewed under ideal viewing conditions.
I would only expect poor calibration to break this test for colors near the edge of the display's gamut, or if there's a drastic-enough shift that the color space's lack of perceptual uniformity means a numerical difference that should have been visible ends up in a different part of the color space where that same numerical difference is not perceptible.
BTW, I used to calibrate color grading equipment for the film processing industry and the controls were strict, 18% gray walls, D65 calibration sources, densitometric equipment, Ishihara tests for me, etc. so I'm well aware of the issues.
Let's say the device has a "24 bit color display". What about eye protection color shifting? This limits the color space used could reduce the effective remaining bit depth. Or maybe they do temporal dithering to get more bit depth? Or maybe the 24 bits are already achieved with temporal dithering?
It does not need to be a calibrated display, but a cheap tablet in sunlight will be worse than a color grading monitor in a reference environment.
I hope they also register the devices used and analyze the statistics on that.
And related, I once had an 'eye migrane'. During that half an hour, the figures of a clock disappeared the moment i looked at them.
I've also had eye floaters which cause things to distort and can be hard to see through. For about 6 months I had a large one in the center of my left eye vision, which was a bit scary when I discovered I might not see a car reflected in my wing mirror.
During an episode I usually first notice it as it is entering my focal region and interfering with reading. Then it sort of moves across my field of vision until it’s in my peripheral, and then goes away altogether.
I've had it happen many times and it's usually followed by a regular headache. Quite terrifying the first few times it happened to me. Felt like I was losing my sight.
Spending the whole night gaming when I was younger would sometimes trigger it in the morning. Thanks to not having any more time for that, it hasn't happened in years.
Got 14/20
The way your brain manipulates your vision 24/7, with no way to get around that, is truly crazy to me. There's all sorts of effects in your visual system like edge detection and certain types of stimulus suppression that it's crazy we even feel like reality is coherent.
Another related effect is flickering of badly designed lighting only in my peripheral vision. When looking directly at the lights they look fine, but when the lights are in my peripheral vision they appear to flash distractingly. I think the peripheral vision is optimised to detect fast changes/movements. At least, that makes sense based on evolution.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averted_vision
The first time I kept my eyes fixed in the same place roughly in the middle which clearly wasn't a good idea. On the second attempt I glanced between each circle in turn, trying to discern the difference over two points in time rather than two points in space.
The dark-mode browser extension I use changes the text from black to white on that page, which I hadn't noticed wasn't the original text color until you pointed out the poor readability of the black text.
Wonder how big an influence the type and quality of screen has. Do OLEDS give an advantage for instance?
For those reporting scores: please also report device type, like LCD/OLED, or which phone model if applicable. Tweakers.net has a large database of screen color measurements. As mentioned in e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43746400, it can make quite a difference
My 18 score was on an Oppo Reno8, the 16 score on the not-known-bad screen is some ~2008 display. On the former, Tweakers reports an average color error of 3.42 ΔE2000, 9.58 ΔEITP, or 2.60 ΔE2000 if white is excluded
> Click the disk that's a different color. Use your eyes only!
Inspecting the color is cheating.
Need some interesting optical illusion type of posts on HN!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._C._Escher