TEDxTeddington - Andrew Hanson - Colour is Crazy

Andrew Hanson was a scientist at the National Physical Laboratory measuring colour for 22 years. He was Chair of the Colour Group of Great Britain 2009-2011, and has built a machine to measure the shininess of cats. In his talk he burns images into the audience's eyes and convinces them that, for a while at least, they are simultaneously understanding the complexities of additive and subtractive colour, and that pink elephants live and fly around the room. One of these effects is more persistent than the other.
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)

[@SD-su2cs]

This is amazing

[@user-rh4gl3yn5q]

Fantastic!!!

[@halonothing1]

As a child, I used to wonder if everybody sees the same colors as I do. Like, is what you see as the color green the same thing as what I see? Or does your green look like some other color to you? Then when I was 14, I learned I'm red/green colorblind. So the answer is no. Because of differences in how our eyes and brains work, everbody experiences color different. So my green is indeed different from your green. But the one thing that's always constant is the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation entering our eyes. Another interesting phenomenon is that of impossible colors. Or colors which can't physically exist. But I'll leave wikipedia to explain that one.

[@xmoreno3366]

Gold Thanks for Share

[@trancerp2411]

There must be something wrong with me, but the last optical illusion did not work. Is this because of my monitor's color space and/or calibration? Or am I just used to reading Joseph Albers?

[@srishtilakhotia8832]

yea same. those three squares looked distinctly blue, grey and green.

[@akshayshrivastava9727]

Even to me .they appeared distinctly blue grey green. Whats wrong .. i don't understand

[@MistaNimbus]

Yip that last “wow” he tried to give didn’t work.. they weren’t all the same colour.. there’s better ways of demonstrating

[@user-mz4ck4qd8h]

I think the demonstration was calibrated for the in-person presentation. Remember that we are viewing this presentation on a computer screen as it had been captured by a camera. The colours and spatial effects are distorted. In part, because the camera does not perceive colour the same way as the human visual system, and in part because whatever colours were captured by the camera then have to be mapped to the primaries of your computer display. I think it did prove that colour is crazy, though!

[@starwarsjunkyard2523]

Nice.

[@trapez77]

The center of our spectrum is yellow-green, not green.

[@lifeinsequence]

It's just a disaster, that flag portion, I focused on it for sometime and when it's gone, I still can be able to see it on screen, even it is not there.

[@drrmagneto4176]

red color under blue light should be purple :c

[@blueskulldragon1968]

yep

[@peterturner345]

Gotta work on the presentation hard to listen to and I wanted to

[@trapez77]

If you want red to stand out in a painting, surround it with blue, not green. Since there is a large percentage of people that can't see the difference in red and green. And surround yellow with green, not blue. because there is a large percentage of people that can't tell the difference in yellow and blue.

[@MrMadalien]

Can't share your intuition there, or at least not when it comes to yellow and green. Yellow and green are quite similar and can easily be confused together, I don't think that would be the ideal pairing for contrast. Blue and red however makes more sense, they are far apart enough on the spectrum that a contrast would form. Are you talking about adapting the contrast for color blind people? Because that only represents less than 5% of the population, I don't think that warrants stifling contrasts.

[@trapez77]

Tomato Lemon most people don't confuse yellow and green, they confuse yellow and yellow-green.

[@MrMadalien]

You're right, I should clarify that this is in relative terms. The yellow and green juxtaposition is *more* confusing than red and green.

[@trapez77]

Tomato Lemon I respectfully disagree