Can These Glasses Help the Colorblind? We Put EnChroma to the Test | Hacker News Reader

Can These Glasses Help the Colorblind? We Put EnChroma to the Test

gizmodo.com

51 pointsIgorPartola19 comments

Years ago I applied (and was accepted) to a special assignment in the US Marines that required perfect vision including color vision. I took a few weeks leave, went to Canada (so there'd be no US medical records) and got lasik and ChromaGen contact lenses. Passed all the vision tests. For me this was the only thing that stood between me and a very cool assignment.

Edit: I eventually passed the Ishihara test (colored dots) where I previously failed it.

My God. That video of the monkey compulsively pecking away at that touch screen for rewards...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEeU8CV_3Mo

That video hits so much closer to home than it should. I see a lot more of myself in that monkey than is comfortable.

> But there’s still the concern that wearing a colored filter while taking the D15 test will alter the relative brightness of the chips, providing a context cue that can help subjects score higher.

I'm confused about this statement: isn't the whole point of these glasses to provide such clues? I may be more knowledgeable about the subject than the average Joe (I like reading about it), or I may be completely wrong (I'm no pro), but it's obvious to me that real color vision is indeed impossible without gene therapy -- you can't show to the brain what the eyes can't detect, at least not through the eyes. Do they claim it provides real full color vision? I don't even think this is testable, for that matter (qualia etc).

Our eyes essentially convert incoming light into three scalar values (one for each of our three cones, S, M, and L). The specific color blindness that this article is talking about is not really color blindness, but rather two of these cones overlapping more than usual. In theory, by filtering out the wavelengths of light in these overlapping regions, you can improve the wearers ability to perceive differences in color. Of course, this also affects percieved brightness, and their is no good way of knowing if the user is telling the difference based on the fact that the signal is being picked up by different cones, or the fact that it is being picked up as a different brightness.

I thought they were talking about dichromatism, I missed the part where they say it fixes anomalous trochromatism only. It makes sense now, thanks.

Deuteranomaly/protanomaly are between them something like 2.5 times as common as deuteranopia/protanopia (other color vision deficiencies besides those four are very rare). So this should still be very helpful to most “colorblind” people.

I'm looking forward to the day that people with "normal" vision are able to see currently invisible colors.

It doesn't look like this technology would allow that, but perhaps gene therapy or some other technology might.

We might even naturally evolve that capability, and there has been some evidence that already there are some people who have that mutation.

There was a RadioLab episode about that,[1] which included discussion of the possibility that in Homer's time humans did not have the ability to see blue.

[1] - http://www.radiolab.org/2012/may/21/sky-isnt-blue/

I didn't listen to the episode, but I'm a little sceptical. Traditionally, in Japanese there was no word for green, only blue (aoi in Japanese). The forest is blue, the ocean is blue, the sky is blue, etc. Green (midori) was only added to the language in recent times. Even now the green light on a traffic light is called "aoi" (blue) in Japanese.

It's not that Japanese people are not able to distinguish between green and blue, it's that linguistically the colours are broken down differently. If you have a discussion about the colours of the forest, for instance, even now many people will insist that the deep, dark green of pine needles is "aoi" (blue) and that midori (green) is more on the yellow end of green (for example new shoots).

So you might be tempted to think that maybe it is the same -- they couldn't see blue and therefore green and blue had the same name. However, the kanji for geen, 緑, has existed for thousands of years and is used in many Japanese words. For example, 緑茶 means "green tea" (as opposed to oolong tea, for instance). So even though the concept of green existed and there was a character for writing it, if you were to ask people 100 years ago (or just ask older people now) what colour "green tea" is, they would say "blue".

So I think it is entirely possible that Homer simply didn't use the word "blue" because he categorized colour differently. It's not necessarily the case that he couldn't see it. Well... I guess Homer was blind.... but you get my point ;-)

More about "grue" in other languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_of_blue_and_green_...

Different cultures have different concepts of colours. e.g. Scots Gaelic has two words for red --- ruadh, which is the red of autumn bracken, foxes, and hair; and dearg, which is the red of paint, berries, and 0xff0000. They don't consider these to be two shades of the same colour; they consider them to be two completely different colours.

Stephen Fry's QI has an episode about color, or maybe ancient rome? anyway I seem to remember Romans not having a word for blue and calling it red or something.

Interestingly, there are experiments to be able to see into the infrared with nutrional suppements: https://experiment.com/projects/can-we-biologically-extend-t...

And I can't find a good reference, but I've read that direct stimulation of photoreceptors (or similar stimulus further downstream) can produce tristimulus combinations that would be impossible with light, due to overlapping sensitivity patterns of cone cells, resulting in experience of "unreal" colors.

Most people can see a short way into the infrared spectrum anyway.

You need goggles with a really good filter to block out all the visible spectrum and a very sunny day --- your eyes aren't very sensitive to infrared so you need lots of light. Given time for your eyes to adapt you can apparently see quite clearly, and it's also apparently looks just as weird looking as it sounds (never tried it myself).

The trouble is it's rather dangerous. Your iris will be wide, wide open because your eyes think it's dark. Any, e.g., sun glare from reflective spots will be focusing an awful lot of heat onto your retina. And you need sunlight to produce a bright enough image to see... so it's not something you want to do without great care, or you're risking blindness.

Reference: http://amasci.com/amateur/irgoggl.html

Just, if you're trying this, be really cautious.

Interesting to note that the 2-parameter space of colors we see (basically, 3 RGB minus one parameter for overall brightness) is completely a consequence of humans only having 3 cones. Since you can basically have an arbitrary spectrum (i.e., arbitrary strength at each frequency), the "fundamental" space of physical colors is vastly larger.

Some humans have 4 cones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Human_tetrachrom...

Interesting subject matter. A tech article which summarizes current research on retinal tetrachromat genotypes can be found here:

URL: http://glimpsejournal.com/index.php/Glimpse/pages/view/2.3-K...

Notice how standard test results suggest to one research group that the color processing among tetrachromats is defective while to another the same results suggest such subjects exhibit higher sensitivity and simply see things differently.

Also curious, toward the bottom of the article is the wide evenly spaced European Starling tetrachromat probability peaks chart with sensitivities well above 300 nm. Hypothetically, it would be interesting to feed output from a Starling retina into an interface with the sophisticated human occipatal lobe and learn what qualial configurations are synthesized in the conscious workspace. Maybe new color qualia would show up.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3qkr7e/iama_colorblin...

I'm colorblind[0] and already knew about the professors in Washington state doing gene therapy on this. I'm eager to join in the human trials when they begin, but my understanding from friends who are scientists that the legal hurdles of such a thing is enormous. My mother found out when as a child I said "wow the grass sure is red today". I've never really seen green grass other than in a painting. Grass varies of course, but it's closer to a reddish for sure though on average. I can't really tell when it's brown and dying very easily either. It's pretty difficult to explain to someone that you "don't know" what color something is really.

I'm not interested in Enchroma though, you can't add lost information. I'm sure it helps differentiate between shades. Just as you can't upscale a 640x480 image to 4K without adding the missing information. I'd like to try them on to test, but without that I can't send these people ~$400 for something that seems dubious to begin with.

I did just learn this from the Enchroma page- "something as ordinary as peanut butter, which should look brown, appears to be green for someone with color blindness!" I had no idea peanut butter was brown. I remember seeing a Sesame Street episode as a kid in the mid 80s where they showed a peanut butter factory, noting the color as a child. I always thought it was greenish/tan.

I would love to see the world how it is to everyone else before I die at least.

[0]http://enchroma.com/test/result/strong-deutan/?completed=1&r...

If you enjoyed this article, I recommend the PBS series, The Brain with David Eagleman. You can watch all the episodes on their Roku channel or their website[1]. The episode "What is Reality?" covers how everyone's brain creates a unique internal model of reality.

[1] http://video.pbs.org/program/brain-david-eagleman/

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