Color for the Colorblind | Hacker News Reader

Color for the Colorblind

boingboing.net

117 pointsSeanDav35 comments

There's no information about how they work in OP's link, but the manufacturers site explains it(although I still found it a little difficult to grasp).

Basically, they cut out some parts of the spectrum where the cones in a colour blind eye overlap a lot.

"There are two types of red-green color blindness: deutans and protans. Deutans, which are 75% of cases, have a defect in the green cone cells. In this case, the defect causes the green cone cell to be spectrally shifted towards red. Green becomes more like yellow. Protans, which are 25% of cases, have a defect in the red cone cells. In this case, the defect causes the red cone cell to be spectrally shifted towards green. Red becomes darker and more like orange.

These spectral shifts degrade the quality of color information sent to the brain. Some colors like blue and yellow are not affected, but shades of green, orange, brown, red, pink and purple are muddled and washed out. If the color blindness is strong, it can be difficult to correctly name these colors, causing problems with jobs and many everyday tasks. People with red-green color blindness can usually see between 10,000 to 100,000 shades of color.

The EnChroma Cx uses a special extra-strength version of the Digital Color Boost™ coating. By removing the wavelengths of light where overlap is occurring between the red and green cone cells, the spectral shift can be reversed, amplifying the color signal sent to the brain. The result is that colors appear to be brighter and more pure. Thousands more shades can be seen. Colors can be recognized more quickly and with less confusion. For many, the effect is a profound emotional experience."

http://enchroma.com/technology/how-it-works/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7721720

Colour vision is based on an opponent process [1]. There are three kinds of colour receptors called L, M and S (for Long, Medium and Short) and they are receptive to colours centred around the red, green, and blue parts of the visible light spectrum respectively.

Here is a good graph showing how sensitive each receptor is to different wavelengths of light:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cone-fundamentals-with-srg...

But we don't perceive colour directly from these receptors. Instead, our visual systems combine the output of these receptors to form three channels: black vs. white (L+M+S), red vs. green (L-M) and blue vs. yellow (S-(M+L)). This is why there is no such colour as a reddish-green or a bluish-yellow; our visual systems are not able to perceive these (except under exceptional laboratory conditions). As you can see in the graph, the L, M and S receptors aren't just receptive to pure red, green and blue but to a range of wavelengths centred near these colours, and they all overlap to some degree. But the L (green) and M (red) receptors overlap quite a bit.

In red-green colour blindness, either the L or M are shifted so they're even closer. This means that the red vs. green (L-M) channel is no longer able to distinguish between the two, so this channel is always close to zero and the person no longer sees either red or green just something muddy in between. Blue-yellow colour blindness is similar, but in this case it's the S channel that's shifted towards the L and M. In this case it overlaps with both and this means there's no longer any colours that activate the S without also activating L and M (and vice versa), making it impossible to distinguish blue from yellow.

For more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process

These glasses work by notching out the parts of the spectrum where the receptors overlap the most. Assuming this works as described, they claim that this increases the relative difference between their outputs, making it easier for colour blind folks to distinguish the colours.

I'm colorblind and I'm very interested in this.

A few years back I purchased for over 700 euros a pair of Chromagen glasses that promised to do the same.

http://www.chromagen.us/

With the Chromagen glasses you had to go to an specialist place and get your eyes tested with a variety of glasses to see which combination was the best for your type of colorblindness. Luckily for me both glasses were the same colors (pink, which even if I can't see it properly, I would prefer if they were another color).

Some interesting things since I had the glasses:

- The first time I saw red trough the glasses was surreal: coca-cola, a tomato, carrots, etc. Was a very emotional moment because you realize how much info is missing in your sight.

- As much as I got excited when wearing them I got depressed when taking them out. The world is excessively green to me which once I saw the world with red in it, a green world is incredibly boring.

- While I tried to make them as fashionable as possible (had the glasses on an Oakley frame (hey it was 10 years ago) I don't think they look to good.

- They were not really sunglasses per se, so I would wear them and still be bothered with the sun which this new ones seem to have figure out.

I will sure give this ones a try. They look good, seem to be fashionable enough and the price is accesible.

Just need to figure out the emotional aspect of it as is really something. I wonder is there's a correlation between mood with colors and colorblind people that can't see red being generally grumpier.

P.S: talk about resting on your laurels. Chromagen always had a marketing issue in my opinion and this is just surreal:

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s3/sh/decd967f-f4da-4ff3-b9fa...

They are displaying Google Ads in their site and I get a retargeting ad of EnChroma Glasses.

According to the site test I'm profiled as Strong Protan. No glasses are available to fully fix my colorblindness, since are only are available for medium protans.

Kind of interesting to get insight into how much of a handicap color blindness is via the revealed preference of whether you'd she'll out $X for them. A different article, David Pogue:

"The highlight came on Day 4 of my tests, when my kids discovered a rainbow arcing across the sky...

Then I put on the glasses. Unbelievable! ... I don’t mind admitting, I felt a surge of emotion. It was like a peek into a world I knew existed, but had never been allowed to see...

So would I pay $600 for these glasses?

The truth is, I don’t consider colorblindness much of a handicap..."

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/pogue/2013/08/15/glasses-tha...

To an extent that's true. But as a counterexample look at how certain communities of deaf people get... very strange about the condition and would even reject a free fix.

To be fair though a huge difference is that the deaf community is bound together by a common language. Language is hugely important in human social groups. A "free fix" for members of this community comes at the cost of the eventual annihilation of their shared language. This is why you typically don't see the same reaction from medical advancements in vision from the blind community, whose impairment has no effect whatsoever on their primary language (and just to be clear Braille is simply a character mapping to the readers native language while sign languages such as ASL are actually distinct languages).

This is a neat idea - a notch filter. The underlying biology is that colours that excite mostly just one type of cone cells are perceived as pure. In colourblind people the absorption spectra of the red and green cones overlap to a greater degree, so if you can cut out the overlap their vision more closely approaches that of a normal-sighted person - except for the part that is filtered out.

But with the recent Amazon flap, should this be patented? It's in essence a neat idea, and physics supply shops will sell you stock dichroic filters for USD 150 each, custom ones are more but not excessive - development cannot have been more than USD 100000 total. That's a programmer's salary and benefits.

Software patents are universally considered abusive because it is cheap to develop - much cheaper than an industrial process, the thing that patents were invented to cover. With this logic the producers shouldn't be allowed to take out a patent.

This is why I always bring up the consideration that the issue is not exactly software vs. hardware whenever I see that discussion.

You couldn't patent a notch filter for obvious reasons.

On the other hand the coating isn't a notch filter, it's a series of bandpass/notch/dichroic/whatever filters which are optimised for colour blindness. If you look at the transmission graphs at least for the UV450 there's varying transmission over the entire visible range. So the patent would be for filters at X, Y and Z nm in a product designed for eyewear.

The problem with software patents is that they're extremely broad - e.g. things that are obvious and well documented in the literature like sorting. There are also obvious hardware patents like rounded corners.

A good example of a design patent is Blackberry's keyboard. They didn't patent keyboards, but they _were_ able to patent the little bumps that help you navigate.

As someone who works in hardware, sure in raw materials it cost <100k, but when you start charging for people's time, stuff gets a whole lot more expensive. Not everyone can live off ramen and sleep in the office. This probably took a few years to properly develop.

The patents (applied for) are below:

http://www.sumobrain.com/patents/wipo/Multi-band-color-visio...

https://www.google.com/patents/WO2012119158A1?cl=en&dq=inass...

It is advancements like this that give me hope for the humanity. This isn't the same level as Geordi La Forge's visor in Star Trek: TNG, but it is in the same vein -- using technology to give senses to those born without them, and thus improve their quality of life. More and more it feels like we are beginning to live in the future speculated about in decades past.

What would happen if someone who isn't colorblind wears these? Do the reds appear even stronger?

I wondered the same thing. I want to try on a pair, just to contrast my total lack of emotional response against the response of those who benefit from these glasses.

Also, I wonder if similar technology could be used to better visualize the presence of UV light, or maybe infrared (sans electricity), beyond the realm of typical human perception.

Just last week I was wondering if this was possible. I hadn't heard about these glasses until today, but I was thinking about the possibility of bringing UV into the visible spectrum.

Mostly this was based on something I had read about with respect to cataract surgery. Apparently the lenses block UV from reaching the retina, but with cataract surgery that isn't the case and patients have to wear glasses to prevent excess UV from damaging the eyes. Apparently Monet [1] had cataract surgery in 1923 and his paintings from that era suggest that he was seeing something in the UV spectrum.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Monet

Do they sell a pair of sunglasses that's marketed towards people without color blindness.

http://enchroma.com/shop/nrg-explorer/

Supposedly, it boosts saturation of colors to create "vivid" and "bright" worlds.

I'd love to try them.

I have difficulty cooking meat by sight as a result of my color blindness. I wonder if these glasses would help.

I have the same issue, but a thermometer is safer in either case.

I don't think they would work. The article says:

   They only work outdoors on a sunny day

I think the reason for that is found on the company's website where they claim

   10% visible transmission

So things are obviously very dark if these are worn indoors.

Things may be completely dark indoors, depending on the type of lighting.

For example, fluorescent lights emit three spectral spikes centered on where typical human eyes are most sensitive to red, green, and blue. They emit basically no light in other parts of the spectrum. So if the notches in these glasses' spectral filters don't line up with those spikes, they'll be totally opaque under fluorescent lighting.

On the flipside, instead of wearing glasses indoors, someone could probably make an LED lightbulb with LEDs whose output was centered on the same frequencies as the notches in these glasses. It should have a similar effect for the colourblind - same principle, just applied in a different way.

I have a r/g color blind friend who has a pair of these.

He said: "They are amazingly totally worth the money and work very well. I have video of myself realizing that Starbucks is green and not brown for the first time. Mindfuck I thought brown like coffee."

As a colorblind I find it a little bit offensive that it in the aricle says that "colorblind react significantly slower to red signals". Red is the topmost light, green is the bottom one. I just follow the light that is turned on, why would it make me significantly slower? Would a not colorblind driver drive if the uppermost light turns green and not red?

Some lights are sideways where I live and one is just a single light that changes colors.

Personally I hate the flashing yellow single light vs flashing red. Side by side I could probably tell a difference,but alone I'm never sure.

The color of the light is much more visually distinctive than the position of the light. If you can't see the colors, you might be able to tell which light it is, but this will take longer for your brain to process, and thus slow you down.

I believe it's fairly well established [1][2][3] that protanopia does make it harder to see red traffic lights, and increases reaction time. A couple studies I looked at indicated that using the position of the light as compensation is quite effective, but it doesn't seem questionable that it is, in fact, more difficult to do.

Color is remarkably useful for fast recognition of objects. Take this famous experiment [4] that showed the existence of synesthesia. People without synesthesia take much longer to locate the 2s in the field of 5s. But people with synesthesia who perceive numbers to have color can find them trivially.

Anyway, as for this being offensive to you -- how is it any different than other facts like "short people have more difficulty reaching objects on high shelves" or "people born without a sense of smell cannot easily detect gas leaks?" These are simple facts, and there's nothing offensive about stating them.

[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1444-0938.2002....

[2] http://www.ltrc.lsu.edu/TRB_82/TRB2003-000250.pdf

[3] http://eprints.qut.edu.au/29558/1/29558.pdf

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Synaesthesiatest.jpg

The green on a stoplight isn't pure green for the same reason. It has a little blue mixed in to help those with red-green color blindness to be able to see the lights.

This is a part of what's wrong with modern western culture. Statements must be filtered not by truth, but by how comfortable they make us feel. If someone is made to feel like they're not special, they become instantly offended.

It reminds me of the research that was done a couple of decades ago now, about IQs among various ethnic groups in the US. This research was considered highly controversial and inappropriate, especially once it started showing there were in fact differences between those groups (though to the chagrin of the white supremacists, people of East Asian origin seemed to slightly outperform the Europeans). Now, to be sure, some of those involved did try to misuse these results, but the outrage went far beyond that.

It may seem obvious now, but these results ended up causing researchers to ask even more interesting questions. We know now that IQ is as much a measure of modernity as intelligence. It is definitely dependent on the environment of both the person taking the test, as the person writing it. People taking the same tests 100 years ago would have scored significantly lower, but it is not because they were less intelligent than we are.

These results also sometimes point out that some communities are in fact disadvantaged in their ability to achieve in the context of the modern world. However, no one likes to be confronted with the need for change since it's easier to become offended and sweep any existing issues under the rug.

I feel as a culture, we still have a lot of growing up to do.

It seems like a novelty toy.

Apparently, they won't help you pass the Ishihara Color vision test, http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/15/glasses-that-solve...

Could the same effect be achieved in software for computer displays?

As far as I am aware, this is not possible. Computer displays work by sending light in a few wavelengths (but in different intensities), using the combinations of different frequencies to produce the same effects as single frequencies. This product seems to work by aggressively filtering out the parts of the spectrum that cause problems. This would not be possible with normal screens, because the light is of a (mostly) fixed wavelength. These glasses would be much better with objects (for example) illuminated by the sun.

Similarly, I think these would work much better with incandescent lighting vs flourescent or LED.

I don't think so, but I think if you could shift the wavelength of the red and green pixels(this would require altered manufacturing process I believe) you could make a colour blind friendly monitor.

The color filters on the display screen are fixed, so the best one can do in software is to enhance the colors (e.g., skew the image towards significant red so that a person whose eyes are less sensitive to reds can see it a bit better).

It may be possible though to have the same filters that are on the sunglasses put on the screen instead. This can work only for displays with low color gamut though.

what about people who already wear glass? I guess I will still need to get contacts to use them

They have a version called EnChroma Cx Receptor that is meant to fit over your glasses. I found out about these today thanks to this post and plan to order a pair.

http://enchroma.com/shop/cx-receptor/?attribute_pa_frame-siz...

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