Enhancement of human color vision by breaking the binocular redundancy

It should be possible, the brain is capable of interpreting vibrating little bumps on the tongue as "vision" after some training.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/device-lets-blind...

By the way, that's exactly how the Dolby 3D system works. You could try this out just with their standard glasses. Maybe you would have to create custom ones with more pronounced frequency differences, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_3D

I am colourblind even by mainstream standards (protanomalous) and years ago in art school I was briefly experimenting with showing the left and right eye steroscopic images and film that were calibrated to different colour temperatures. At least for that effect, I did not notice a significant difference.

Of course, colour temperature is very different from truly splitting spectral bands. Should have thought of that!

As long as you're using 2 filters, you're only adding one dimension to the distinction, so it would remain tetrachromatic. You would be able to distinguish more metamers than the configuration in the article (hence having more utility, probably), but ultimately you're still only gaining the "channel" of your binocular discrepancy as a virtual photopigment.

I believe that's basically how Dolby 3d cinema glasses work. https://www.dolby.com/us/en/professional/cinema/products/dol...

I wonder if wearing those glasses out and about would give you the kind of enhanced vision described in this article.

All the 3D cinemas I've ever been to use RealD, which uses circular polarity, rather than colour to separate the images for the 2 eyes, so I've never experienced the Dolby glasses

Interesting.

Carrots/Vitamin A were credited with the RAF shooting down enemy planes in WWII - Apparently a cover story for radar.

http://gizmodo.com/carrots-improve-your-vision-is-a-wwii-lie...

I often notice this effect when lying in bed with one eye open, and the other closed on the pillow.

The closed eye will be bluer, the open redder. My own theory (backed up by nothing but a hunch) is that the closed eye adjusts its white-balance to compensate for the red light coming through the eyelid by becoming bluer.

I see more red and more blue in one eye as well. You are not alone. I have asked my optometrists about this over the years and they just shrug, like "that is amusing".

when I was a kid we had one of those big VHS camcorders with a black and white single eye veiew finder. It looked blue through one eye, and grey through the other. I never noticed it anywhere else.

One eye sees more red, the other gives a blue tone to everything. But very slightly, easier to notice when comparing what I see when using one eye at a time for some reddish thing (furniture, mainly). And seems that astigmatism and a toxoplasmosis changed those levels (lessen the effect).

i thought this is common knowledge; there used to be red-blue 3d glasses that worked with specially prepared pictures and a bit of practice and the red-blue color scheme wasn't an accident.

Do you know why you see things this way? That's interesting.

I have noticed this effect as well. Always thought about it, but never did anything to find out more about it.

It is noticeable when lying down and looking at a white ceiling and alternatively closing and opening each eye.

I wondered if it is inherent to the eye, or the conditioning of the eyes at that moment in time. For example, will my right eye always see more bluish and the left eye more reddish? Or does this depend on the fact that I am laying down in my bedroom where the light enters from the window that is to the right of me, and desensitized one of my eyes to some wavelengths.

These filters were already optimized so the sum of their stimuli would match the tristimulus. (So you still perceive the same baseline as normal trichromats but with another asymmetry on top.) By removing a frequency range, you're just losing information and deviating from the standard perception, so I don't think it increase resolution, unless you were proto- or deutero-weak and needed the distinction boost anyway.

They do touch on expanding this by splitting all 3 photopigments, but that would be a much more challenging filter to make.

I was thinking that an active display could add more resolution by adding some time-dependent dimension to colors. Say, "high" reds/blues/greens would pulse quickly and "low" ones would pulse slowly... sort of a fourier transform aspect going on that could get you some scalar gradability rather than a straight up "left blue" vs "right blue" contrast.

It's all really cool though regardless.

I thought that too, after I saw an explanation of the notch filter they use, I was much more impressed with the glasses.

"Subjectively, we observed that, by looking at a particular color through both filters simultaneously (e.g. filter 1 over the left eye, filter 2 over the right), a “meta-color” is observed, which appears to be different from the original perceived color and both individual filtered perceived colors. This meta-color is a manifestation of the “extra” effective cone type created by the pair of filters, and demonstrates the increased information relayed to the visual system resulting from the partitioning of the S cone."

Sounds like butterfly level vision (4 cones)

I'm not in the field, but I think the cool thing about this is that it's accomplishable with passive components created with straightforward tech (one filter was off-the-shelf). Most hyperspectral/extraspectral visualization tools require complicated active displays.

That said, it's pretty similar technology to those color-blindness correction glasses [1] -- just filters that accentuate the distinctions between colors you could already see. From a philosophical perspective, it's probably not going to be emergently perceived as a whole new color "dimension", but rather just an augmentation to your preexisting experience.

I do think these kinds of small tools will be a key, but subtle part of AR in the future. I would certainly take a pair myself. I always like wearing polarized sunglasses because you can perceive the extra information of which materials are polarizing or dichroic.

I came here to suggest this. Great to hear that someone actually tried it and found it to work.

Did it take long to get your mind to 'get' it? Did the effect fade? What polarization filters did you use?

Humans can see polarization without any apparatus, but it requires practice and patience.

http://www.polarization.com/haidinger/haidinger.html

I think that overlap just means we are very sensitive to color variation for radiation around 550nm.

Here's filter #1. [1]

Filter #2 was custom-made. Not sure if that's orderable in small quantities outside of academia. But you could try to find a filter that fit their "naive approach", which would be simple bandstop (aka "reject" or "notch") filter that blocks approx 450-510nm. Just looking around the same retailer, maybe something between these two ([2] & [3]) might suffice for experimenting? Ideally it would fit that range precisely AND have a rather absolute cutoff. I have no idea if that kind of arbitrary range selection is available to one-off buyers, I'm just a fan of color theory. :P

The issue with the naive approach is that it skews the white balance of the results a bit by affecting the M&L cone stimulus as well, but that's a lesser issue for playing around with the idea.

[1] - http://www.omegafilters.com/450lp-rapidedge.html

[2] - http://www.omegafilters.com/products/filters/500rb.html

[3] - http://www.omegafilters.com/products/filters/460-od-0-4-notc...