Whilst surfing the web this evening I stumbled onto some videos about what the world is like for people who are colour blind.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend at work today. We were discussing him getting a new phone case and he was looking at champagne gold and rose gold. He said he preferred the champagne gold as it seemed lighter and went with his phone, which is gold, where as the rose gold looked darker. I said to him that rose gold is pink and the champagne gold is a lighter silvery yellow gold.

We share a common interest in films and TV and also some music. When we talk about films he is totally focused on the plot, characters and their development. I on the other hand being much more imagery focused, am awestruck by some imagery.

Going the images and videos online I can kind of see why. I had no idea how much people who are colour blind are missing, well of course I had an idea but I have never really tried to put myself in the shoes of someone who is colour blind.

When taking online colour vision tests I always score very, very highly and have always been very imagery focused and picture things in my mind's eye well.

I feel very grateful for my colour vision is all I can say.

Is anyone here colour blind? Have you ever had someone try to describe the additional colour to you? I can imagine it is pretty much impossible.

There are now glasses that correct color blindness.

http://enchroma.com/

Yeah I read about that. People testing the technology are doubtful that it is providing true representation of colour as the glasses are actually blocking some light rather than increasing sensitivity to certain light. They do supposedly give the user a more 'vivid' colour experience.

My son is colorblind, going to have to show him those glasses. Might make a world of
difference to him.

Nope, tested every six months.

Most interesting. I assumed from the proposition that it
must involve interference filters, but I didn't realize that
the signals are all there available - despite a lifetime of
always getting green and red firing together, distinct
subjective experiences of red and green remain available,
according to their tech page: http://enchroma.com/technology/

All you have to do is notch out the majority of the overlap,
and the two sensors will be firing at much different strengths
for the two sides of the notch, so the distinct signals will
be separately experienced. I had always figured that all that
stuff worked like most other visual bits - most of the wiring
is tuned up after birth, and if the hardware isn't working
properly, those synapse circuits don't get built during the
development window, and so never get built. But apparently,
though you've been seeing brown all your life, the correct
filter will sort it into red and green for you.

...On a distantly related note, when I was a teenager, working
with theatrical gels and similar lighting stuff, I actually
ended up with a bunch of christmas wrapping "paper" which was
tinted cellophane, in red and green, which could be enlisted
for home lighting experiments. I discovered from my typical
random curiosity that if I tried to completely block out light
by covering my eyes with several layers of each filter, that
after waiting outside in bright sunlight for my eyes to get
accustomed to the darkness, I could see through the filters,
and the sky was blue, maybe slightly richer, artificial colours
like plastic garden hose and house paint were their normal shades,
as were gravel and asphalt, but all chlorophyll green plants were
bright red, and flowers were all sorts of improbable colours,
yellows and purples. It was a very odd effect, much moreso because
so many things weren't affected. It reminded me of the photos on
the Donovan "Gift from a Flower to a Garden" album cover.

I tried the effect again decades later, using a set of coloured gel
sheets I got from a hobby store that I was using for making red-green
3D glasses, and I saw the same effect, but not nearly so pronounced
as with the cellophane; probably just the vagueries of the response
curves.

I'm not color blind, but my Dad is. I mean red-green everything-is-shades-of-gray color blind.

When I was a kid I could tell Mom was really, really pissed at him. She'd lay out a pair of pants and a shirt in very 1970's orange and green (respectively) for him to wear to the Rod and Gun club and hang out with his cronies. Apparently it was kind of a running joke with them, so he was never sure if they were telling him the truth about it or not.

My wife and I disagree on what a color is by description, though. I never learned proper names for a lot of them - teal is about as an exotic a name I put to any of them.

With a few exceptions - recently I bought a pair of desert camouflage pants that come from Denmark. The light tan that would be on US desert BDU's is desert sand. She isn't very versed in military stuff and declared it's pink. It's not pink. It's desert sand.

Say it with me, desert saaannnnddd.

You were in the army, they had a history of "pinks and greens."

How would you know if the glasses even work? For all anyone knows they just make what is actually purple look like smurple now.

There are tests for measuring the level of color blindness. There are some on the page for the glasses. The hue differences in color let you see images in certain patterns you will not be able to see if you were not "seeing' the right color.

Also, causes of color blindness are known (which there are several, in various degrees). Mostly caused by deficiencies in the pigment cones cells of the retina. Not all of them are correctable.

But for those that can be corrected, it is expected the correction will allow you to see what a normal person sees.


But for that matter, how do you know ANYONE sees the world the same way as you do.

I don't. Didn't we have a thread a while ago detailing how it's possible ancient civilizations like the Greeks thought the oceans were purple?

Of course that could simply be due to how they explained/documented them as well.

War is peace! Freedom is Slavery! Pink is Desert Sand!




(incidentally, the SAS Landrovers were really pink back then! I have a Tamiya model of one somehwere, still unbuilt.)