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Comment by louprado | Hacker News Reader

I couldn't help but remark on this. I posted the following comment 418 days ago. I am sure this is a case of simultaneous ideation.

3 points by louprado 418 days ago | parent [-] | on: Life in Technicolor – One month wearing color blin...

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 ?

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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

maybe this explain why some of us can't handle 3D movies, they might be partial tetrachromats?

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!

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

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...

the article's about 2011... so when is the product actually coming out? I'm not blind (maybe yet?) but I'd like to have them for some local blind ppl...

http://www.wicab.com/

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'm not sure I follow your argument here... it seems to me that you would be getting three independent signals on each eye, thus the perception would be effectively a 6-dimensional color space.

I guess it comes down to whether you think you can (immediately) process the "red delta", "blue delta", and "green delta" independently. I wasn't stating my assumption that I thought it would be nontrivial for your brain to identify more than the overall distance between the colors. I do agree there are technically 6 information channels; I just wasn't sure if a human could actually use it expediently.

That said, I think I've come around to the idea that we could see multiple signals. I could probably identify "right-brightness" & "left-brightness" as separate from "right-desaturation" & "left-desaturation". But can I also separate those from "right-CCW-hue-rotation"? Can I pair it with "right-greenness/blueness/redness" in a way that I am gaining a full independent channel of information? Maybe it's like 2.2 channels worth. :P

I guess I shouldn't speculate at all; it's easy to be misled in hypotheses about perception.

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