Watched few videos and make me ask this, how this glasses work?
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Humans see colors by three different types of light-sensing cells in our retina called photoreceptors. Each of these three types of cells are most sensitive to the wavelengths of light corresponding to red, green, and blue. (There are also rod cells which just sense light intensity) However there is quite a lot of overlap in the color photoreceptor sensitivity, particularly for red and green. Light that is stimulating green photoreceptors the maximum amount might also be stimulating the red photoreceptors at 90%!
Our perception of color then is formed by the combined input from each type of photoreceptor. Our sensation of yellow for example comes from both the red and green photoreceptors being stimulated. However for people who are color blind there is something wrong with one of their photoreceptors meaning certain colors are difficult to tell apart. Red-green color blindness is most common.
What the special glasses do is to absorb light from certain wavelengths of light more than others, tuned such that it alters how much some of their photoreceptors will be stimulated. It isn’t providing sensory information from the messed up photoreceptors but just makes the wavelengths look “different” so they can be distinguished.
Color “blindness” is kind of a misnomer. While there are some people who truly only see in shades of gray, the vast majority actually have some variable degree of color “deficiency”.
You know how screens or LED’s can make almost any color by combining red, green, and blue light (RGB)? Our eyes detect light in a similar way, sensing how much red, green, or blue is in the light coming in.
In people with color vision deficiency, these cells have closer overlap. For example, I’m red-green color”blind” (deficient). I can still see red and green light as different colors, but my red- and green-detecting cells sometimes have a hard time distinguishing between the two.
I can still look at paint colors and see that a vibrant red is clearly red and a bright green is clearly green, but if you show me a sort of reddish brown next to a brownish green, the difference is much less obvious.
Those special glasses work by filtering out a lot of the in between brown tones in the light coming into my eyes, so that I will pretty much only see the red component of the reddish brown and only see the green component in the brownish green, making it easier to distinguish between the two.
Your eyes can see a range of colors from 380nm and 760nm. That is, we can tell the difference between two different wavelengths when they’re both in that range. Some colorblind people are missing 1 of 3 color cones and can’t tell the difference between red(700nm) and green(520nm), but they can still see the colors between blue(470nm) and green(520nm).
The glasses take all the light that blends together for them, and squishes it down into the range that they can tell the colors apart. They don’t see any colors they couldn’t see before, but all the details that were hidden from them now suddenly pop out.
For a real short and sweet answer:
The company that makes those glasses have a whole webpage about it:
https://enchroma.com/pages/how-enchroma-glasses-work
Basically, popular forms of colorblindness is because they have something wrong with their eyes and the transition between red/green/blue colors is messed up, these glasses block out those transition zones (wavelengths), and since many objects are 1 exact color wavelength, blocking out the more red-ish aspects allows you to see the more green-ish aspects, and vice versa.
So it doesn’t let them actually see the colors they couldn’t, but by blocking certain wavelengths it actually shifts the hues to colors they can see.
Here’s my basic understanding for a real eili5:
Look at a rainbow 🌈 roygbiv. You see all the colors, but it’s hard to pick out a single color because they all blend together.
Those glasses take some color away so you can see the separate colors better. So instead of roygbiv let’s say it’s ro g iv. You now have better separation between colors and can pick out a specific color better.
The glasses don’t take out whole colors, just small segments of the color spectrum but hopefully you get the idea.
I’m color blind – I have a pair of “eye glasses for color blind” that I rarely use, but I can explain what they do NOT do: Make you see/identify colors you cannot see.
Or at least not as it’s phrased. Light is a spectrum, and the receptors in my eyes have a problem recognizing (differentiating) a certain part of that spectrum. By applying a filter of the light in front of my eyes, that changes the spectrum, what without glasses looks like one color, becomes two (or more). However, the colors in the spectrum close to that, which I can see without glasses will no longer be differentiable. It doesn’t fix the vision problem.
“Luckily” most color blind people have only a small spectrum or a few diverse small spectrums of colors where the receptors have problems; but you do have people who are close to black/white levels of receptors only. No glasses resolve this. Surgery if we could do it, would be the only way.
I use my glasses rarely. It helps if I use software that uses colors (please stop doing this!) to indicate meaning and to me I see 4 “same color dots” and an impossible mapping. SOMETIMES the glasses will allow me to differentiate the 4 colors, but by no means will I know what color they are to you who have no colorblindness. I suspect most people if they could see colors with other people’s eyes would be confused – we perceive colors differently but have an agreed upon interpretation of that. Color blinds simply cannot differentiate enough to make that leap. I’m tired of being told that one color has 10 different color names – it’s one color to me, but everyone else sees slight nuances that I cannot.
And to be honest – a lot of times the glasses will not help there. To use the computer software example above. I may be able to see the graph legend use different colors, but I cannot tell which color it is on the graph. Identifying colors is HARD for me. Even if I block all the other colors, I’m not sure if the two colors that are close to one another, are the same or different. Only if they are close to one another can I see they’re different, but don’t ask me what color they are. Green, Brown, Red to me are not what they are to you. I confuse them ALL the time and no glasses will resolve that.
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