Forget what colour The Dress is, there's another optical illusion blowing our minds
The dress has destroyed all other news in its path today
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Your support makes all the difference.Unless you have spent the day under a rock or are somehow currently on Mars, you will have been asked to consider whether a dress is blue and black or gold and white.
But The Dress is now officially old news.
Entrepreneur Azeem Azhar has tweeted a swirling optical illusion, in which stripes that appears to be green and blue are actually the same colour.
Like a news juggernaut, The Dress clogged Facebook and Twitter feeds across the world today, as people argued over whether it was in fact blue and black, or gold and white.
Scientific theory was quickly introduced into the debate to confirm that The Dress is in fact both combinations of colours, depending on who and where you are.
The colour you see indicates how your eyes work out colour in a world lit by sunlight.
Similarly to how white balance works in cameras, if the brain sees a white shirt bathed in yellow sun, for instance, it needs to subtract the yellowness of the sun so that it can see the whiteness of the shirt – and it normally does.
In the spiral picture, where the colors in both spirals are a turquoise colour (0,255,150 for those who want to know), context is what makes the difference.
The swirls look different because our brains judge the color of an object by comparing it to surrounding colors. As the orange stripes don't go through the "blue" spiral, and the magenta ones don't go through the "green" one, they appear to be different colours.
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