Sunglasses That Could Correct Color Blindness | Hacker News Reader

Sunglasses That Could Correct Color Blindness

smithsonianmag.com

48 pointspif23 comments

I have these, they work for me. They make a really big difference in distinguishing things like red/green traffic lights, or vegetation on top of red brick. They also just make all of nature look a lot nicer.

If you have any questions about them, I would be glad to answer.

What sort of color blindness do you have? And is what you see qualitatively different, like is there a new 'feel' to the color being made apparent? Or is it more like the tiny differences you were always aware of are more intense?

Glad they work for you, by the way. Tough problem to solve.

I have red-green deficiency, so red and green both seem like they have a lot of white in them (I found out). For instance, green traffic lights actually look white-green to me without the glasses, and same for red. The sunglasses make them look like a pure, brilliant green or red with no white added.

I would describe it as a pretty big difference, it's not tiny, it's really obvious, and whenever I forget my sunglasses or can't wear them for whatever reason, the outdoors look really muted.

They won't work if you have complete color blindness, because there's no red-green distinguishing information to work off of.

Right, gotcha. Excellent, I may have to keep these in mind for a few friends.

Do they have to be modified or customized in any way for you depending on sensitivity or whatnot? I suppose I could look it up but your situation may have differed.

I don't think there are any options, I just got "large" "black" sunglasses in one of the few frames they offer.

Looking at the diagrams [1], I see that it works by creating 3 pass-bands. I understand how it would work for natural light. But how well does it work for you with CRT/LCD monitors that simulate the color gamut using just the three primary colors? Do these glasses help you with monitors too? How well do you discern color on monitors with/without these glasses?

[1] http://enchroma.com/technology/how-it-works/

It doesn't seem to do anything to monitors (I just re-tested). I'm guessing because a monitor only really shows me three colors, there's no problem.

The glasses don't seem to help with distinguishing colors on monitors.

I can discern color on monitors just fine, I'm only partly deficient, not completely color-blind.

Thanks for the info. I understand that you're only partially deficient. I was merely testing a hypothesis of mine, that RGB-based image sources should not show an improvement for you.

The corollary to the above would be that CMYK-based sources should perform worse. So do color pictures in magazines, and other print material appear particularly washed out to you, and rather darker when you wear these glasses? I am not sure about color prints from film cameras.

This is really interesting, but the articles description makes no sense to me:

> EnChroma’s technology works by placing a band of absorption on glasses that captures light, pushing the cones away from each other and reestablishing the normal distribution of photons on them.

The glasses are not pushing the cones on your retina apart (if they are you're probably wearing them a bit close), so what are they doing?

I think they mean the absorption artificially increases the separation of the mean response wavelength for both the red and green cones. Essentially it is reducing the overlap of their spectral response by filtering out the places where they can strongly overlap for the 99% of colorblind people with this type of colorblindess[0].

[0] 99% number is from the article. I have no idea if that's accurate or not.

Edit: Clarifying wording, spelling

Typical science/tech Babel effect. Try EnChroma's own explanation.

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

It seems like a pretty straightforward band-pass filter in the visible frequency range. I don't know enough about eye physiology or chemistry to say whether that would really have the effect they claim, but it sounds like plenty of people have already tried them and found them useful somehow.

Actually that description is sound conceptually: the cones' spectral absorption peaks are shifted apart with a stopband filter.

I made an image to explain it. The grey area (conceptual, I don't know how big it is), shows wave lengths blocked by the glasses. As you can see those wavelengths give strong activation of both red and green cones. The remaining wave lengths activate just one or the other. This mean if a light source has both green wavelengths and yellow wavelengths, the filter will remove the yellow ones, making it look green instead of yellow.

One form of color blindness arises when the green and red peaks are especially close, making a large span of wavelengths look yellowy. By filtering those out, the person can get color vision.

http://i.imgur.com/dMlzKUN.png

Thats a great explanation, thanks

I have red-green colour blindness, and I tried prototype contact lenses that claimed to do this about 15 years ago.

Did they work? I don't know! Everything certainly looked different and a lot more vivid.

I guess I would have had to use them for a long time and 'retrain my brain' before I got any benefit.

They were quite expensive, and I just didn't like it - I might have been seeing as a normally sighted person, but I just didn't know what the colours were that I was looking at, so I decided not to use them.

As someone with a green deficiency, I'm not impressed. These glasses may distort the natural colour spectrum enough to be useful as an assistive technology when dealing with bad accessibility, but I wouldn't buy them unless colour distinction was essential to my work.

Implants or gene therapy would be interesting. Assistive technology, not so much.

Since you called out green deficiency specifically I think you're one of the few people I've seen actually define their specific colorblindness, instead of just saying "red/green colorblind". I have the same, green deficiency (deuteranopia) and I've read others with it who have tried this had little to no benefit. It's good to see it confirmed again. It's tempting to buy but I would be severely disappointed I think based off everything I've read.

I just think calling everything "color blindness" isn't particularly helpful in discussions about color vision. In everyday conversations I just say I have a "red/green weakness", which is what most people know it as in my language (German). However the term carries a few unfortunate implications (namely, that it's just about distinguishing red and green in general, which couldn't be further from the truth).

If you're in the same boat as me, having to explain yourself whenever you tell people what it means to be "color blind", I've found this article helpful: http://critiquewall.com/2007/12/10/blindness (the images are nearly indistinguishable for me, except for a few variations in intensity and subtle changes in hue).

I've used these and think they're awesome. Even as a non-color blind person, they make colors a lot more vibrant.

I also got to see my colorblind friend witness his first rainbow, which was an incredibly cool moment. We had to stop the car and pull over just to look at it.. great technology.

I'd love something like this. After I realised others saw more colours than me I've been thinking a few times what the world really looks like.

This was up on reddit a week or two ago. They thought it was pretty "meh"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7721720 - they've been here too. A few times, with not much interest.

Actually it looks like it's been on reddit multiple times in the last 2 years with some decent interest and a fair number of positive reviews (as well as a few negative, some of which could be dichromatic which it doesn't work for).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com