How do colour blindness correcting glasses work ?
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They don’t, at least not as advertised.
The dominant color blind glasses manufacturer started out marketing them as “gamer glasses” which had no benefit for colorblind people. The premise of the glasses was that they filter out certain wavelengths of light and that this would help people who were staring at a computer monitor for long periods of time to reduce eyestrain. They didn’t sell very many of the glasses.
They then rebranded the glasses as being for office workers, with the same line about reducing eyestrain. Again, they didn’t sell very many glasses.
Then they had a marketing campaign in which they paid “colorblind” people to try the glasses and break down crying due to being able to see color for the first time in their lives. These people were paid actors. The glasses do not let totally colorblind people see color. But this advertising campaign was a huge success and they’ve stuck with it. Fundamentally nothing about the glasses has changed since they were gamer glasses, just the marketing surrounding them.
The supposed idea as to how they work for colorblindness is that they filter out certain in between colors. Say you’re red-green colorblind. You can still see red and see green, but its hard to tell them apart when you’re looking at a mix of colors that fall between the two. These glasses filter out all of the colors between red and green. In theory this might help you to be able to differentiate between red and green by removing all of the color in between them. They also do the same thing for the blue-green part of the spectrum.
The glasses *may* help a red-green or blue-green colorblind person to differentiate between these colors. The glasses are not doing so by allowing you to see more colors, they are doing so by blocking a substantial amount of color, leaving only primary colors. The impact that these glasses would have on your life as a red-green or blue-green colorblind person are very minor, if they would have an effect at all.
Their biggest impact is actually going to be on computer monitor eyestrain – they are legitimately effective in helping to prevent that (and it is still one of the selling points if you go to their website).
The videos that you see of people crying or freaking out or whatever are paid advertisements. None of the reactions that you see in those videos are real.
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