Live data from Hacker News

Why we're blind to the color blue

calebkruse.com

211–218 of 218 posts

Re: Why we're blind to the color blue

#211
As other comments have pointed out, this article is inaccurate — particularly about root causes. It's frustrating in part because it is so easy to tell it's not true: look at anything "blue" and notice that it's not blurred. There are a few operating principles here that explain why this observation is functionally incorrect, but also how it's adjacent to the truth.

The first is metamerism, or more generally the fact that we don't observe wavelength directly. Many of the blue colors we can perceive in the real world have a lot of "green" and "red" wavelengths in them too; the cones that detect green and red will still fire for those collections of wavelengths, but the blue-detecting cones will fire faster. We perceive "blue" through higher level processing of those signals; furthermore, it's not a 1:1 mapping.

More importantly: most light we see isn't spectrally pure, so chromatic aberration is not as significant as those charts seem to indicate; rather than multiple distinct planes of good focus, you really have a general region that has a minimum spot size. For most human eyes that spot size is pretty small; errors in the human eye are going to be a larger factor than chromatic aberration for most people.

Also significant: most chromatic aberration people talk about in lenses is lateral chromatic aberration, which can be significant in biological eyes — it's supposedly why herbivores with wide fields of view have horizontal irises! — but for human color vision, most of our acuity is in the foveal region, for which LCA is vanishingly small. The magnitude of LCA is a function of angular distance from the chief ray (~foveal). Axial chromatic aberration has a much smaller effect and generally only affects your minimum spot size, but as mentioned before biological eyes are not accurate enough for this effect to dominate.

Now, what the article nearly gets right: there are examples of light you can't focus on: short wavelength light that is spectrally pure (and sufficiently distant) could be 'unfocusable' for certain eyes. I can report with high confidence this is true for my eyes, and likely for a lot of other people. You can see this with blue laser light, some violet-hued LEDs (not red + blue mixed), or even the visible spectrum from mostly-UV sources. I find that the light itself will appear to have a halo and not be particularly sharp; for me, the perceptual effect is not quite like it being blurry, because the shape of the 'blur' is affected by my eye's aberrations, so it tends to have a 'spiky' bokeh. YMMV.

Finally, there is a truth about human color vision that the tests here seem to get close to: we mostly perceive sharpness or acuity in images as a function of luminance, not chrominance. (Modern image and video formats exploit this extensively.) In fact, the equation to derive luminance from chrominance values models this explicitly; it varies based on color space, but here's the equation for sRGB:

Y = 0.2126R + 0.71522G + 0.0722B

Where Y is luminance, and R, G, and B are the individual color channel values (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_luminance). Note the coefficient for blue suggests that only ~7% of our brightness perception derives from the blue channel. This is the source of chroma-based data compression, where we throw away data in the chrominance channels but maintain it in luminance (see YCrCb coding), which is also the reason why blue seems to matter less when doing per-channel blurring: it simply contributes less to the perceived luminance value due to the mechanics of human color perception.

Re: Why we're blind to the color blue

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eye color doesn't matter in vision, it's not part of the optical path, its role is the same as an aperture on a camera lens.

Ok it seemed to me that that the stroma of blue eyes scatters back more light: https://medium.com/@ptvan/structural-eye-color-is-amazing-24...

Yes, scatters it back out — that light does not enter the pupil or contribute to what that person sees (save probably a vanishingly small amount that is re-scattered in the cornea, which is totally de minimus).

Re: Why we're blind to the color blue

#213
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally know that digital clock effect you're talking about. It's caused by something else though. It's actually a physiological hallucination due to high power ultrasonic waves coming out of those types of clocks. Rather than smoothly turning a small crank at 60rpm like in an analog clock, the clockwork gnomes inside digital clocks have to frantically push and pull a lever at 32.768KHz, and their stiff little poin…

Oh... What? Hallucinations from a 32kHz RTC? Can't tell if your entire comment is a joke or just the last half... Couldn't find a thing after a quick search but now I'm curious.

None of it was serious. :-) Although I have indeed noticed that particular optical illusion of the clock digits moving relative to the clock.

Re: Why we're blind to the color blue

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> About one in three people has some degree of astigmatism. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/8576-astigmat...

> about 9 in 10 people have some degree of Astigmatism https://patient.info/eye-care/astigmatism

I wonder why there's such a big degree in difference between the two claims.

Re: Why we're blind to the color blue

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> about 9 in 10 people have some degree of Astigmatism https://patient.info/eye-care/astigmatism

I wonder why there's such a big degree in difference between the two claims.

The 30-60% is most likely for those affected by their astigmatism. Astigmatism is when the eye isn’t a perfect sphere. Many people have very slight astigmatism and don’t require correction.

Re: Why we're blind to the color blue

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider the time period and the historical context. It's modern times, Cold War is occurring, and WW1 and WW2 left scars across Western Europe and caused major changes in the art world, including being a boon to abstraction and fragmenting styles into many eclectic directions. Chemistry has DRASTICALLY altered painting from the Renaissance to the World War era. New pigments have been constantly highlighted and displ…

There’s a really great short story by Alistair Reynolds about an artist that’s obsessed with a certain Zima blue (name of the story) which is essentially an extended meditation on the above, I think you might like it. :)

It was an awesome short as part of Love Death and Robots https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9788510/

Re: Why we're blind to the color blue

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

9 in 10 people have some affliction of astigmatism. Astigmatism is just that your eye isn’t perfectly spherical. What does your eye prescription say in the cyl and axis fields, that’s your astigmatism correction.

20/10 and 20/13 means much better than average good vision. It would be bad if they were e.g. 20/30. Funny that you're LARPing an eye doctor without knowing this.

You can still have 20/10 vision with Astigmatism. I guess my years of research into astigmatism because of my own affliction and years of optics study visual effects means I’m larping. Never said I was a doctor, I’m just intimately familiar with how corneal distortion.
Post reply on HN