Yeah, this is the best explanation for why this 'controvesy' happened.

Certain background lighting conditions and colors can significantly alter the color and luminance of certain objects in that lighting environment, which otherwise, in less extreme lighting environments, look different.

Even just understanding basic color theory can show you how to make a color pallette out of either mutually complimentary colors, or highly contrasting colors... and how humans largely, (though apparently to differing extents and by different means), interpret a total color space by comparing and contrasting the colors within that space to each other, as opposed to against some objective reference point of all possible colors.

The other part of this explanation is that...

People were not talking about the same image.

Someone would argue one way, another person argues another way, and then someone else would do some kind of photoshop job to argue for one side, and their explanation and reasoning and justification would get lost, and ok now you have multiple images spreading around and being argued over by the same population that would...

... in 5 years, essentially start a civil war over the idea of whether or not it makes sense to wear a mask during an epidemic of a virus transmitted in the aerosolized spittle from sneezes, coughs, and even just breathing.

But yeah, when this was an ongoing thing, I'd have multiple different people in different camps... sending me actually different images, and it took a while to figure out which one was the actual original origin image.

Which of course I had to do on my own, but critical thinking and basic research skills, an impulse to verify the base assumptions of a claim or argument... many people do not know how to do this, or only selectively do it with things that challenge their pre-existing notions.

As in using the colour picker on the image and finding the corresponding code? That's actually an explanation that I can get behind. Classic example of trust your instrument.

I see the dress as gold and white, no matter ehow hard I try to see the other side of the coin.

If theyre the same color, why can i see the black outlines way clearer in the yellow dress w/ blue tint side ?

Very interesting. I wonder how big the effect of culture is on how people perceive this situation

Ah, so white and gold folks are, indeed, mistaken.

Thanks!

am I part of the joke here??? It's clearly blue and black...

The objective fact is…it is a blue and black dress. Other photos of the same dress show that.

But I cannot, for the life of me, see how anyone can possibly get that from this photo. Sample the RGB values all you want and it clearly is not black in this photo. The exposure and white balance have messed around with it so much it is incomprehensible to me how anyone can see it as blue and black.

You’re good. It’s black and blue. At a pinch, maybe blue and black.

What is global illumination from sky lighting again ??

You can sample the colours and see it’s white with a very light blue tinge and gold.

People who see it as blue and black are (correctly in this case) auto-correcting for the yellow light as the dress itself is black and blue.

Whereas people who see it as white and gold are (subconsciously) assuming a blue shadow and seeing the pixels as they’re displayed.

You can literally sample the rgb values

It doesn't matter. This phenomenon can be explained by something called color constancy.

I remember some versions of this image where I could literally switch between perceptions at will, when I imagined different surrounding light temperatures/environments.

It's a subjective perception.

Where the hell is the black supposed to be? Nothing is that dark here. I can easily accept blue, white, or gold, but there's clearly no black.

They see the blue as shaded white, and the glossy black has enough yellow reflected in it that they think it is shadowy gold. Basically, you’re seeing the dress as if it’s lit from the front. You see the colors as blue and black, because that’s what’s on the screen. But other people’s brains decide that the dress is backlit, so the colors facing the camera are actually shaded.