About
Why dazzle, why today?
11 November is Armistice Day, Remembrance Day and Veterans Day. On that morning in 1918 the fighting of the First World War stopped. Among the strangest legacies of that war is a fleet of thousands of ships painted like modern art.
We wanted a way to remember that war that's thoughtful and still genuinely playable. Dazzle fits. It was a real wartime problem, it was solved by artists, it's visually stunning, and the science of whether it worked was being re-examined as recently as 2024 and 2025. You don't fire torpedoes here. You sit where the camoufleurs' test observers sat, at a periscope looking at painted models, and find out whether the paint fools you.
How the Periscope Test works
- Real 3D. Each ship is a simple 3D model: a hull, superstructure, funnels and masts. It's drawn in true perspective from a low camera. Dazzle shapes are designed on the side elevation and clipped onto every face of the ship, as on the Royal Academy's models.
- Controls. Three of your ten ships are plain battleship grey. Your Dazzle Factor is your average error on dazzled ships minus your average error on plain ones.
- Horizon pull. For every ship you didn't badly misread (error under 90°), we compare how far its true heading was from "sailing along the horizon" with how far your guess was. A positive number means you saw ships as more side-on than they were. That's the horizon effect described by Meese & Strong (2025) and Lovell et al. (2024).
- Scoring. Each ship is worth up to 100 points: 100 × (1 − error ÷ 90°), and anything 90° or more off scores 0.
- Posts. Cadet views from high up at close range with no time limit. Officer gets one 5-second look at periscope height. Commander gets a 2-second glimpse from just above the waves, in rough seas and haze.
- Share links. A challenge link stores the random seed, so your friend gets exactly the same ten ships, headings and weather. Studio links store your whole design in the URL. Nothing is sent to a server.
Honest caveats
- This is a game, not a laboratory. Your screen, the simplified 3D models and our pattern generators are not the conditions of 1918 or of the modern studies. Your numbers are just for fun.
- The six paint styles are inspired by historical approaches. They are generated procedurally and do not reproduce any specific ship's scheme.
- The real question was never settled. The 1918 statistics are confounded by ship size, and the modern studies find only modest benefits from the paint itself.
Credits
Concept, code, 3D renderer and all visuals are original, built for this site. Fonts: Big Shoulders Display, IBM Plex Sans and IBM Plex Mono via Google Fonts. No trackers, no cookies. Your scores and saved ships stay in your browser's local storage.
Sources
- Wikipedia, Dazzle camouflage: Wilkinson, Kerr, numbers of ships painted, the 1918 Admiralty statistics, Van Buskirk's figures, WWII schemes and modern uses.
- Meese, T. S. & Strong, S. L. (2025), Blodgett's (1919) "Ship camouflage" 105 years on: A misperception of dazzle perception revealed and redressed, i-Perception. Also on PubMed.
- Lovell, P. G. et al. (2024), Dazzle camouflage: benefits and problems revealed, Royal Society Open Science; Abertay University news release.
- Gizmodo, WWI's famous dazzle camouflage seemed effective due to unexpected optical trick.
- TIME, The history of dazzle camouflage: the 1917 timeline, the studio team and Lida Rose McCabe's quote.
- Western Front Association, How effective was dazzle camouflage?
- Camoupedia (Roy R. Behrens), Loyd Jones and ship camouflage models, and Wikipedia, Loyd A. Jones.
- Wikipedia, Everett Warner.
- Mary Evans Picture Library, The Great Dazzle Ball, Chelsea Arts Club.
- Periscope technique and "angle on the bow": uboatarchive.net and PBS NOVA.