Life in Technicolor – One month wearing color blindness-fixing glasses | Hacker News Reader

Life in Technicolor – One month wearing color blindness-fixing glasses

arstechnica.com

22 pointsbatguano9 comments

While many of us are not "color-blind", we are all color challenged. This is because we only have three cone-types, assuming you aren't a tetrachromat.

I had a thought experiment: Suppose you breakup visible light into six bands. You then create two filters based on these bands. One filter would pass only bands 1, 3, and 5. The other filter would pass bands 2, 4, and 6.

Now suppose you put one filter over your left eye and the other filter over your right. Over time, could you learn to see the world in hexachromatic color ? Could you finally differentiate monochromatic yellow from composite red and green ?

To digress further, I previously wrote a Google Cardboard App that randomly shows a red square in only the left eye, only in the right eye, or both eyes. Surprisingly I could not answer correctly if the red square was only shown to my left vs. my right or both. I am not sure if I could learn to do this. Perhaps it is a limitation of the visual system. I was hoping to introduce a new visual effect for VR headsets but it doesn't look promising.

Whoa. Sounds cool, but a small market. Enchroma & competitors might already have the filters figured out -- maybe not too hard to get to manufacturing?

Birdwatchers and entomologists would go ape if you could include UV bands, but I don't think you can do that with a filter, since we can't see UV at all -- you'd have to use a custom camera.

How much does it cost to manufacture a CCD with a custom filter -- replace Bayer GRBG with ... IR-R-G-C-B-UV or something? I'm guessing quite a bit.

Interesting idea. I wonder how much eye strain there would be? I remember headaches wearing the old colored 3D glasses for to long, but I think that is a larger difference than what you are proposing.

It turns out that watching YouTube videos of people seeing color for the first time can turn even the shittiest of days into a good one. I just lost 30 minutes down the rabbit hole. Interesting that it's not just color that I take for granted every day, but the fact that the world appears so sharp.

This is what native advertising looks like.

It looks like he received a free press sample, but beyond that I don't think he received any inducements. I'd call it more a product review plus a description of what it's like to be colorblind.

> EnChroma is not a new product, nor is it the only set of glasses aiming at colorblindness (see 2AI Labs, for instance). ... EnChroma even offers a "Product Testing Program," where would-be wearers can apply to earn a free pair through participating in certain company initiatives (like talking to the media).

And although he clearly likes them, it's not a breathless endorsement. More a reflection on the impact of sense deficits and their technological aids.

> I can certainly live without the EnChroma glasses, of course. At 30, I've spent three full decades viewing the world in my own peculiar fashion, and I've been just fine. But then I think about 6-year-old me, staring in disbelief at the purple ocean, and believing it to be blue. And I think about all the confusion and trouble it could have caused had I not been identified as colorblind.

I liked the article because of its depth and reflection, even as a non-colorblind reader.

This article is a paid ad.

Evidence?

Maybe the most enjoyable one I have come across on the internet.

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