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Comment by delinom | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried color blindness glasses (e.g. EnChroma)? I am not familiar with them but some reaction videos were pretty heartwarming.

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I have, yes. I can describe it sort of like this:

Imagine you're watching a black-and-white movie on an old TV, and it looks kind of washed out. You fiddle with the contrast, and suddenly the movie looks much crisper and with better contrast. You're not actually seeing more colors -- its just grayscale -- but you can optimize it to give you more depth of perception.

That's what EnChroma does. It doesn't actually make you see red, but it heightens the contrast to make it stand out more.

That's what I imagined it to be, a slight improvement but obviously no miracle.

So, does it just look like different green? Like still green, but you can tell it apart from "true" green? Like wearing them could you pass a colorblind test even though you still can't see red?

i can see reds and greens, but very similar shades next to each other, i can't tell. i also can't see either color very well when it's a really small sample size (for example, the green under my power switch on my wireless mouse to show that it's on).

the way i think about it is that people who aren't colorblind have a maximum green value that is much higher than mine. the enchroma glasses, which i've tried, effectively make greens more green. i feel like it makes things inaccurately colored, but exaggerates colors enough to be able to better differentiate. i still can't see past my "maximum green" value though, which is why those marketing videos of people crying are total bullshit. it just looks like a very saturated instagram filter. it doesn't make me see colors i haven't seen before.

i didn't try a color blindness test with them but i should have. the best memory i have of using it is that it was fall time and the leaves on a bush in my yard were turning red, but i had no idea until i put the glasses on, and i could distinctly tell which leaves were turning and which weren't.

i liked them and wanted to keep them, but i couldnt justify the $220 price or whatever it was, so i returned them. i want to get another pair some day

Those videos are fake the glasses don't do very much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY-NF_7R-pk&t=559

Well that was eye opening

Colorblind person here. This debunking video is piling on more BS, like oh, colorblind people learned to be amazing at detecting slight color changes! No, we are not. We learned what names are attached to what color, but we see them differently, much poorer (save for blues). Enchroma apparently helps with separation, as parent comment suggests. That being said, the fake dramatic videos are definitely shameful scam, agreed.

What boggles my mind a bit is that true colorblindness glasses don't seem that difficult to me. Standard red-blue 3d glasses almost do it, it's just you need red-green differentiating glasses. I don't think this would Open the World of Color!, but it would with a bit of practice probably allow you to at least perceive a difference.

But the glasses need to be visibly-differently (to a non-color-blind person) tinted. If they look the same, they're not going to work. Just like a "blue-reducing" pair of glasses needs to look visibly yellow, or it clearly (in all senses of the term) isn't doing anything.

A truly optimal pair would take some sciencing but bashing something prototype-quality with something like https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0928YT83C would be a matter of holding up the cyan-ist of the films up to one eye and the magenta-ist of the films to the other, and looking at some red and green things, concentrating on which eye the object is bright in.

RB 3GD glasses remove color to create a different image. I don't see how that would generalize to add color.

If one removes red while the other removes green, then if something looks dark through the lens that blocks green, and looks bright in the one that doesn't block green (but blocks red), then one could tell that it is green. (and visa versa for something red)

Not that this would give the same subjective experience of a person w/o colorblindness seeing red vs seeing green, but I wouldn't be surprised if it allows one to pass r/g colorblindness tests fairly well?

It wouldn't. It would subtract, but differently for each eye. Differential subtraction between two eyes is not addition, but it has certain characteristics in common with it.

Im red green colorblind. When wearing my enchroma, some things I thought were brown are actually very red.

On the other hand green lights lose their green.

On a day to day basis I can functionally see red and green, but sometimes when a red or a green is next to a brown I cant distinguish them.

And versions of red that regular people might have a hard time distinguishing would be impossible for me to distinguish.

> but some reaction videos were pretty heartwarming

shameful marketing campaign

I've tried them, they kind of make reds pop a little more.

But imagine this. You put on a pair of pink tinted glasses to fix your vision. Ok great, but everything is tinted now. I don't find it pleasing at all. My normal is my normal, putting tinted glasses on me doesn't make things look better, it looks wrong.

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