We Got a Zoo

Scott Hardie | August 8, 2015
If you had the resources to have any exotic animal as a pet, what would you choose?

Samir Mehta | August 8, 2015
[hidden by request]

Steve West | August 8, 2015
Yes, safety.

1. Koala
2. Brenda says cheetah but I think that's lame so let's go ocelot
3. Jackal

Chris Lemler | August 8, 2015
Safety first.

1. Monkey
2. Skunk
3 Tiger

Erik Bates | August 10, 2015
[hidden by request]

Samir Mehta | August 10, 2015
[hidden by request]

Chris Lemler | August 10, 2015
well a skunk is just to keep anybody out of your yard that don't belong

Scott Hardie | August 11, 2015
All of these sound fun. I want to visit your backyard zoos. Myself, I suppose I'd go with a mantis shrimp, for the same reasons that The Oatmeal likes it. Difficult to contain, yes, but quite a conversation starter.

Scott Hardie | August 11, 2015
On second thought, the mantis shrimp is less the animal that I'd like to keep in a zoo, and more the animal that I'd like to be for a day. I'm fascinated by the idea of what colors it must be able to see.

Matthew Preston | July 27, 2016
Not quite the 16 cone receptors like the mantis shrimp, but this is still a fascinating discovery.

Scott Hardie | July 31, 2016
That's amazing! Not only is it fascinating to imagine what colors the tetrachromatic woman might be able to see, but how the scientists thought to find her by studying genetic mutations. What a great story.

Matthew Preston | May 4, 2021
I happened across this article today and it continues my fascination with wanting to experience seeing colors that the human brain cannot imagine.

I then did a search and found this site which tries its best to mimic the experiment for at home use. Using my mobile device, I am able to see... things. I'm being vague, because I'd love for someone else to try this (works best on mobile) and report back what they're seeing. I don't want to share my experience that might possibly aid in confirmation bias. Anyone willing to give it a shot?

Scott Hardie | May 6, 2021
I'm willing but not really able. Thanks to my lazy eye, when I look at something, I usually see a sharp image and blurry image of it superimposed on top of each other, and my brain has trained itself to ignore the blurry image. So when I try to look at a stereoscopic image like this, I see the left part really sharp, but the right part is blurry and they never really blend together for me, this one included. :-( What do you find?

That said, it occurs to me that as a web developer, I have another way to combine two colors. I can write a script that outputs alternating pixels of the two colors, hundreds of thousands of them, offset by 1 in each row to create a checkerboard pattern. This should blend them similarly to the experiment described in your first link, Matthew. So, I went ahead and made it, using the exact colors from that article. (Give it a minute to draw the page. I want to keep the file tiny by generating the output every time instead of saving the output on disk.) I won't spoil the outcome but I will say that I find it very interesting. :-)

Erik Bates | May 6, 2021
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Matthew Preston | May 6, 2021
Scott, that creation you made is awesome! I'm with Erik that it's a very uneasy feeling seeing those. At first, I thought you programmed it to be flickering/moving. I increased the page size gradually to 500% on my PC and they became more and more unnerving. Almost like what I'd assume is an acid trip.

My experience with the "+" images:
I found that although I'm able to achieve the stereoscopic event, it's tough to focus on both colors at the same time. Most of the time, I find one or the other color fading in/out. Sometimes, I can see a similar pattern like you have on your design (almost an interlacing of the two colors). For brief moments, I am able to see a different halo color around the stereo object.

Red+Green gives me a kind of magenta hue. Very rich and vibrant, but not anything that I'd say can't be described. I'm thinking it could be more of a bleed over effect from the white background on my mobile device.

Blue+Yellow gives me a kind of cyan hue, again rich and vibrant, but again not something that can't be described.

Scott Hardie | May 7, 2021
I'm sure you all remember the blue/black or white/gold dress from a few years ago. This reminds me of that. Combining these opposing colors is less about creating a "new" color (I agree with Erik that it just sort of looks brown) and more about creating a "color" that is simultaneously two colors at once. I'm not going to bother coding this because I don't think it's necessary, but I bet if we put my pixels inside a frame of just one color, they would seem to be another color entirely (not brown), and you could get them to seem to be several different colors depending on the color of the frame. Much like the infamous dress, it has to do with how context causes our brains to interpret color. So maybe we can't really see blue-yellow or red-green no matter how they're blended, because our brains just aren't wired to perceive them as one color regardless of what our eyes can see.