I’ve long wondered if lenses that filter out green would make bird watching any easier.
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We go into it in depth on the website, it is pretty complex and wouldn’t fit in a short piece like this. www.enchroma.com
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They really are digital! The lenses use step based optical filters designed on psychophysical research. Digital connotes the ability for the algorithm to implement in the coating discrete changes to the design; we can isolate any one element, say the transmission of the wavelength of light at 640nm, and then make that filter, rather than the ‘analog’ process “add more red to the tint” which affects everything.
Analog/digital was the best way we found to describe this much better approach to making a lens filter.
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Hue is created by the opposition between the cones so if you are one of the incredibly few people actually missing a cone you are out of luck. You don’t see red with the red cone, you see it by the red vs green cone.
Easy way to understand the lenses is that we know where that opposition goes wrong for the color blind and we get rid of the exact wavelengths of light which pull them away from this correct ratio. That is why they are sunglasses.
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Are these eligible for purchase with medical flexible spending accounts?
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Basically: most cases of colorblindness aren’t caused by a total absence of one or two of the three color receptors, jsut a malformation in them that causes the spectra of light a malformed receptor senses to seriously overlap with what triggers one or more of the color receptor types.
These glasses fix that by selectively filtering out just the wavelengths located in the overlap, so the receptors respond more normally.
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Is this a gadget advertisement? I’m a colorblind visual artist so these are incredibly appealing to me but I feel like a good Boing Boing article would dip into how these expensive glasses work and then tell you how to make your own pair for five bucks using common household items.
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This is a post on my own colorblindness and thoughts about it on my blog, December 1, 2000:
http://www.anigami.com/jimwich/jimwich_archives/jimwich_12_2000.html
Being somewhat red/green colorblind myself (enough to flunk the tests), I’ve always been very interested in color vision and how it works.
When I was in college, taking a color theory course, I had an opportunity to compare what I saw with what others around me with normal color vision saw, using Pantone chips. Two things became apparent over the semester, regarding my color vision and how it compared to others’:
1 - A person’s color vision could be represented by a dimensional plotting. The visible color spectrum can be divided into equally spaced points (colors) for testing an individual’s color vision as chroma intensity and value level is decreased. The results can be plotted as an irregular, dropoff curve, probably varying as the testing moves along the spectrum. As the testing proceeds along the entire visble color spectrum, these individual slope profiles can be stacked to extrude a dimensional hillside that would represent a person’s color vision profile.
2 - I speculate that colors along the portions of the spectrum I have cone deficiencies for, look somewhat similar to me as they do to others, only darker. Stopsigns and Coke cans seem pretty red to me. Grass and John Deere tractors look green, green, green to me. Really bright and vivid. But I think my color vision begins lower and drops off much faster than normal people’s when the chroma (color intensity) drops toward the pastel range, or when light is lowered. For example, I simply can’t see the green in oxidized copper. And low-chroma pastels like light pink and mint green can sometimes look similar if faint enough or in low light.
The component of the red and green spectrums that I “don’t see” yield an overall darker effect to the color. i.e.: that light is actually not being picked up, so the source appears darker. This is why when I was little and was asked what color the purple crayon was, I’d answer, “dark blue.” And likewise brown looked like “dark green.” To put it another way, if there were a blue and purple that people with “normal” color vision would see as having the same value (light to dark), I would see the purple as darker, on account of its red component that I’m not picking up. And I often confuse pure green on a monitor (R0, G255, B0) with bright yellow (R255, G255, B0). It only looks slightly “darker,” sorta mustardy I guess. In fact, I never think of this pure RGB green when I think of green, since I have trouble recognizing it/distinguishing it from yellow. The green has to be enough into the blue spectrum as grass green before I start recognizing it as green.
In my color class we had to each make large posters using a 24 x 24 grid of one inch square pantone chips. I made something using randomly distributed colors, but alternating light, dark, light, dark, etc. in a subtle checkerboard pattern. Towards the middle I used brighter colors and towards the outside I used progressively more pastels. To me it looked clearly like a checkerboard that got fainter towards the outside. To everyone else in the class it looked completely random. They couldn’t see the checkerboard!
It’s surprising, but I’ve been searching for years and have found very little published on color vision beyond the old Ishihara tests that have been around for years. One would think color vision would be graded similarly to, say, nearsightedness or farsightedness. After all, we don’t simply go around saying, “he’s blind, she’s normal, she’s blind, he’s normal” and so on.
I contend that color vision could be mapped for individuals as a 3D “hillside” which represented the color spectrum horizontally and the steepness of dropoff at any point along the hillside denoting the rate of perception dropoff for that portion of the spectrum. It would be plotted using datapoints gathered from a randomly-flashed set of computer graphics. I imagine the test cards or graphics themselves could be configured very much like the Ishihara graphics, only there would be more of them, representing finer differentiations of chroma and value ranging from full intensity and value to none. My graphic above hints at what a resulting plot of test results might look like, though it doesn’t show the variance in chroma and value that I envision also being encoded in the plot. The Y-axis would represent intensity of chroma and the X-axis for each slice would represent the lightness value from full intensity to completely dark. Dips and steeper dropoffs along the Z-axis of the spectrum would show color vision deficiencies.
The test would be structured similarly to a hearing test where various tones and volumes are played. The computer would interpret the results from any one test as a point on a particular color’s sloping curve, ultimately assembling all the datapoints into a hillside graphic. It seems that the resulting map would be quite a bit more informative than the Ishihara numbers-in-the-dots tests as they are used. Case in point - my uncle is also colorblind, but quite a bit moreso than I am, with him having difficulty seeing oranges growing in a tree (I have no problem with leaf green or orange orange). Yet we’re both coarsely defined as “colorblind.” I believe there should be a much more precise measurement and rating of colorvision. That way, I could compare my color vision profile hillside to his and see how they differ, where along the visible color spectrum, and by how much.
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patrace:
I feel like a good Boing Boing article would dip into how these expensive glasses work and then tell you how to make your own pair for five bucks using common household items.
If I understand properly, they work by filtering out wavelengths where color impaired people see an overlap between what we consider discrete colors. This leaves a distinct color on either side of the confused area which is now easy for these people to see clearly (Color, please be gentle on me if I have screwed it up)
It might barely be possible to do a crude imitation of this at home by using theatrical lighting gels.
It is possible to use those gels to make goggles that will push your vision right out to the red/infrared edge of the spectrum
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Don’t patronize me, nor the other readers here. I read your webpage before I posted. Words have meanings, which are not subject to redefinition by biscotti-addled PR flacks. The term ‘digital’ has a particular meaning. This is not in any way digital. ‘Digital’ implies a circuit changing between two discrete levels of voltage over a short time period, for the purpose of carrying information. Here you have a bandpass filter which changes between high transmission and low transmission over a small change in wavelength. This is not a time based operation; saying it ‘switches quickly’ is nonsense. Nor does it carry data. It’s a different thing, like night and day can’t be referred to as true and false.
Don’t get me wrong: I think you have a very interesting product here. Please don’t blow it by technically ignorant PR which hurts your case.
How about posting an actual spectrogram of absorption vs wave length, instead of the idealized cartoon on your
webpage? Something like the ones on this page:
http://marketplace.idexop.com/support/Technical-Library/How-to-Select-a-Filter
[mod note: removed signature]
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That company is called Eye Poker which sounds a lot less pleasant then the card cheating they had in mind!
Just stop it, that’s not what the word means, go look it up. Your lenses absolutely are not “digital.”
Using the word “digital,” when what you apparently mean is that you have a precisely calibrated filter that blocks certain wavelengths in narrow bands without affecting others, is inaccurate at best. It makes your marketing materials confusing and your product sound like some crank snake oil product.
It is unfortunate, because once I read enough to figure out what is going on it sounds like an interesting product.
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If you want to make your own for $5 (actually $3, but you need to own an iPhone), get yourself a copy of DanKam, Dan Kaminsky’s colorblindness-correction app.
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Lasers produce intense light at a single wavelength. I have long wondered about a laser projector, with single-wavelength red, green, and blue output at the wavelengths where human vision receptors peak. Would it produce much more pure colors because the shape of the human response would no longer matter, or would it produce different colors for different people because energizing only one point on the human response curve rather than averaging over a wider area could accentuate differences between people in color sensitivity.
In any case these glasses make me think laser projectors would be good for colorblind people.
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As someone who is colorblind, how do I know I can trust someone when they tell me what I’m seeing now is red when my concept of red itself is impaired by a lifelong inability to properly see it?
How do any of us know that we perceive colours in the same way? I mean I get that for most non-colourblind people we interpret a certain wavelength with a certain colour and because we’ve always done so we can identify say 4×1014 Hz as red. But how do I know that the “colour” my brain perceives 4×1014 Hz looks anything like the colour someone else’s brain perceives the same thing? For all any of us know a “hue-shift” might just be making us see the the world as other people do!
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Now how about some glasses to help this man with your new page design. Love you, hating it.
It is quite simple to do something similar. Get one of the RGB LED lamps (the color adjustable ones) and set it to white. It should mix R G and B (which do not really overlap) into a whitish shade.
If that is the only light, you will notice that red, green and blue look very pronounced. Veins in my hands are too red - scary.
The downside is that other colors shift. Orange: is red. Yellow, like the wooden floor: very dull. A lot of nuance is lost.
Now, an RGB LED is just one thing. But is is an easy and cheap experiment to perform, to see if this helps you.
By the way I do not thing the glasses would help a lot with an LED traffic light: that red is already so pure that filtering will aither kill all the red, or just pass all light of the LED through…
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New US Navy lasers = ultraviolent light.
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Now make some so we can be dodecachromats. Or more…
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I bookmarked this: http://boingboing.net/page/1
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