I saw another enchroma glasses video and wondered, if the person has always had “faulty” eyes that give wrong colours and smaller range of colours to brain to process, where does the error come in? If it’s the light receptors, how would glasses change those receptors ability to somehow now give correct colour for brain to understand.
And also how can brain understand those new colours immediately? I guess it must be hard coded to DNA and brain has developed correctly with that ability even if eyes can’t provide correct signals to match with colour data in brain.
In: 0
The glasses just make the colours more distinguishable.
There is an issue where there is absolutely no way to know if someone sees red the same way as you. Same for all colours, possibly excluding white, grey or black.
Colour blindness isn’t seeing colours differently, but seeing less amount of colours. This makes shades look the same.
The glasses exaggerate the colour differences so a colour blind person can distinguish between a rose and the grass. (If they’re red-green)
So, there are multiple kinds of color blindness. The kind of color blindness that Enchroma glasses help with is called anomalous trichomacy.
With that kind of color blindness, colors of light that the red cones are sensitive to overlap too much with the colors of light that the green cones are sensitive to. This means that when you see something red or green, both cones activate and it’s hard to tell if it’s actually red or green.
The glasses are what’s called a notch filter. Basically, they filter out a small “notch” of color that is right in the middle of where the red and green cones overlap. This makes it easier to distinguish between red and green because the red cones don’t activate for green as much and vice versa.
[This is](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mohamed-Elsherif/publication/346900208/figure/fig1/AS:967127251034119@1607592513577/Ocular-color-receptors-in-color-blindness-a-The-sensitive-wavelength-ranges-of-S-M.ppm)the curve for light sensitivity of the three different cones in the eye for normal and for some types of color blindness. You can see even if you have normal vision there is a lot of overlap between red and green curves. It is the relative strength of the signal from red, green, and blue cones that is used to determine the color
Red and green objects we see in nature do not just reflect a single frequency bit of a spectrum, A red object reflects red light to you but also some in the other part of the spectrum
What Enchrome glasses do is to filter out the light where the curve overlaps the most. Look at https://www.covisn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/filter.jpg where there are 4 areas pointed out by the brown arrow that is filtered out. It removes the overlap and sleep which simulates a single cone the most.
The removal of the light that simulates multiple cones to similar degree makes it easier to tell colors apart
Human color vision uses up to three different photopigments to detect light (in daytime conditions). Two of them are very similar to each other; they’re not precisely tuned. Yellow light activates both.
If you block yellow light *and* you have both of those receptors, you will see more vivid green-yellow-red distinctions. It *cannot* show anyone colors they haven’t seen before, it just intensifies some colors. So the amount it helps depends on what you start with. I’ve highlighted the more common kinds of color vision that people have.
It amplifies the good parts of your color vision
– **normal color vision**
– blue-yellow colorblindness
It can help quite a lot with the bad parts of your vision
– **partial red-green colorblindness**
It does little to nothing for people with
– **strong red-green colorblindness**
– no color vision at all
The way these products are marketed is a recipe for disaster and frustration. Enchroma uses a not very nice marketing strategy where they target NCV relatives and are like “hey, this will (maybe) help your friends and family members” – they build a lot of hype and… well, imagine that they do nothing for you. Which isn’t uncommon. Now you’ve gotta break the bad news to your friends.
A smartphone app that rotates hues, identifies colors, or overlays texture (or all three) is a *lot* more reliable.
Latest Answers