The glasses aren’t without some issues - while red-green perception improves, other areas of color vision suffer. I scored 0/8 without the specs (so obviously colour blind), but 8/8 with them on (normal colour vision)! I’m pretty thrilled and can’t wait to explore more of the world with the specs over the next few days. I’ve just done a quick 8 plate Ishihara colour blindness test. When I first put one of them on, I got a shiver of excitement at how vibrant and red lips, clothes and other objects around me seemed. I’ve just received a couple of special specs to attempt to reduce my colour blindness, from Mark Changizi and O2Amp. Here’s a quote from Dan Bor, a red-green color blind neuroscientist who tested the glasses: Once the glasses were released, though, Changizi and his collaborators began hearing from color blind people who had put them on and experienced the world in an entirely new way. Another potential application is for security officers such as the TSA the glasses may help officers better identify people in an agitated state. Hospitals are using the glasses to help with diagnoses - they can make bruising under the skin from trauma and other disorders more obvious - and to help nurses find a patient’s vein. Based on that work, a few years ago Changizi co-founded a company called 2AI Labs and started development of a set of glasses called O2Amps designed to amplify the visibility of blood oxygenation and other factors that help make these physical and emotional states more apparent. He has put forth an alternative (or perhaps complementary) theory to the idea that human red-green color vision evolved to help us find nourishment, instead proposing that we evolved the ability to see color to understand the health and emotions of the people around us. His work on color vision is particularly interesting. Neuroscientist Mark Changizi (whose work I first wrote about here) has written extensively on the evolutionary history of vision, and why everything from our depth perception to our written language evolved the way it did. But more significantly, just recently scientists have figured out a way to help color blind people see more normally. Maybe one day scientists will figure out a way to let us see what birds see. And if that sounds amazing, think of butterflies, some types of which have seven cones, or the mantis shrimp, the organism with the world’s most complex eye, which has sixteen cone cells! Those guys must have a technicolor life!Īll of which is to say that the colors that exist in the world are far more numerous than we can perceive, whether we are color blind or color normal. Birds have one extra type of cone cell in their eyes, opening up a world of different colors than we have. On the other hand, when I listened to this episode of Radiolab, I realized that lots of animals have better color vision than we do. (If you are color normal, you will see the numbers 6, 12, 2, and 42 in the charts below.) And I imagine it must be frustrating to know that there’s information hidden in the pattern, and yet be completely unable to detect it. I’ve always found the Ishihara test to be joyful-looking, like clusters of colored bubbles, though bittersweet that something so beautiful could be the confirmation of bad news for someone. In the film, Brill cleverly co-opts the visual language of the Ishihara test, a series of dotted color plates used to determine whether someone has problems with their color vision. The short film above, “Ishihara” by Yoav Brill, offers an emotional peek into the world of someone with severe color blindness. What would I miss, beyond the boundaries of my own visible spectrum? Would I understand the lack intuitively, or only by comparison with others? As a color-lover, I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be colorblind.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |