Hacker changes the way people with colour blindness see the world

Edit:

tl;dr - color is a 3D space. Colorblind people can only percieve two of these. This device may change the projection of the 3D space on their 2D space, but it will not magically make the third dimension pop out.

-- original post, a bit less synthetic.

Color is a 3D space (wherever you chose to put the axes, RGB, HSL...) because we have three subtypes of color-related light detectors, called cones, in our retina (there are more photosensitive cells, but they aren't involved in color).

Each cone is sensitive to a range of the visible spectrum, with peak sensitivity respectively in what we call red, green and blue. These ranges are overlapping, though, which allows our brain to interpret monochromatic light correctly by weighting the response of each type of cone.

See [1] for a schema and a more thorough explanation.

Note also that magenta exists as a color (ie unique subjective experience), even though no monochromatic light can evoke it. You get it by stimulating the red and the blue cones, sparring the green one.

All of this to say that with two cones, you're stuck in a 2D space of color blindness.

This tool may help colorblind people to get a different projection of the 3D space in their 2D detection field, but they will not be able to perceive the 3D space at once.

--

For those who didn't get their dose of photoreceptors trivia:

The retina also contains another type of detectors called rods, which are much more sensitive to light than the cones, and is involved in both day and night vision whereas the cones are only stimulated in daylight This explains why you don't percieve colors in the darkness.

At last, the recently discovered melanopsin containing ganglion cells are involved in the circadian cycle and other light-related acivity in the autonomous nevous system.

--

[1] http://www.unm.edu/~toolson/human_cone_response.htm

The opposite would be really good for designers - augmented reality of what a colour blind person would see. Would be good to check if your design is going to make life difficult for the colour blind.

I am looking forward to testing this out.

I wish they would have a colorblind test at the start and adjust the settings for me based on what kind of colorblindness I have.

Interestingly, and perhaps more importantly, the theory works the other way too. It is possible to simulate color blindness for normal people as well. I know I've seen an application that allowed you to view various things as the various colorblind conditions would see it. It allowed you to check things like button contrast on websites.

Another thing I don't understand is that if you're used to seeing things in a certain color space, and this app "fixes" it, then wouldn't it look strange to you? I mean, I get that it can be useful to discern colors that look the same to you, but it's not like the image will be more "normal" for you right?

Great app. I wouldn't recommend using it in a theater, though (the original inspiration).

Didn't want to waste my money on this, but judging from the fact that this app doesn't use magic(and screen caps), I can tell you that it doesn't work.

You can separate colors on a spectrum all you want... it doesn't make a bit of difference.

Now... if you had it display the name of the color... great. That would be a huge asset. Not an expensive chore that just confuses me more.

This is quite nice, but the real killer version would be when the user has "virtual light" glasses (cf William Gibson, or - more physically - Prof. Steve Mann's "EyeTap" wearable computing ideas).

Then the colour-blind user would receive the benefit as long as they were wearing glasses (contrasted to looking through a phone when they needed to check a colour).

As a colorblind person, I'd like to see something similar to Barcode Scanner with a smaller reticle to identify colors (RGB | human equivalent name) the reticle is over.

When I have some time, I plan to do this myself, if nobody else does.