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- cross-posted to:
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I was gifted a pair of enchromas, and while they don’t make me see “new” colors, it’s undeniable to me that they allow me to distinguish between some colors that I previously could not.
For example, light pinks always flatten out to grey for me. Wearing the glasses lets me distinguish between grey and pink. Likewise, I can see the fall colors in trees and can point out which ones are red/orange/green/yellow whereas I could not before.
So yes, they are deceptively marketed and probably not worth the money. But they do, in fact, have some utility.
This is accurate. Most likely you have a mild form of CVD, where some of the cones in your eyes overlap in their light frequency response. This makes it hard to distinguish colours containing that frequency range, because multiple cones respond to them when only one should.
The glasses actually work by completely blocking out the light in those overlapping frequency ranges. This will help to avoid the confusion between the cones, and could help you better distinguish colours containing components in those ranges. That’s also why the glasses have this pink hue in the video. By removing some colours from white light, the remaining ones combine into pink-ish light.
Obviously, you cannot restore normal colour vision by blocking out even more colours. The marketing from enchroma is pretty scummy.
It sucks that their marketing is shitty, because what they actually do seems pretty clever. I have a pair of enchromas and I enjoy them for what they are - being able to distinguish color differences when I can’t normally is fun.
It’s an overpriced novel experience, probably not worth it but cool if you can afford it.
Shitty, but also really clever in terms of marketing. “Helping people with colour blindness more easily distinguish between certain colours whose wavelengths overlap (but are distinct to those without colour blindness)” is accurate, but not as exciting (or as easily understandable) as “FIXES COLOUR BLINDNESS”.
Fair, I honestly don’t know how else you explain that to most people concisely.
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Sorry I wrote rods once when i clearly meant cones. You are correct that rods do not detect color of course, thank you for noticing the error.
Here is a pretty nice article on CVD that explores a lot of the genetics. It even mentions the enchroma (not by name of course) in the management section:
Another strategy—the use of so-called ‘notch filters’ to artificially separate the effective peak sensitivities of the expressed X-chromosome-coded photopigments in red-green anomalous trichromats—has yet to be explored fully.
This might be an older article as i believe some research on notch filters has since been done. As far as I know, there is some limited evidence that they improve performance specifically in colour discrimination tasks. There’s usually no evidence that they improve overall colour perception.
Not all cases of CVD are of this kind either (although it’s the most common cause), if you have monochromacy, dichromacy, or generally anything other than anomalous trichromacy, these glasses will do nothing. There are even rare cases where the eye can see colour perfectly fine and the problem is in the brain, although this is usually classified as some sort of aphasia and is not strictly speaking colour blindness.
So I’m curious, what do things look like with the glasses on that you’re able to distinguish these colors? Can you describe what you’re seeing when you see gray vs. pink with and without the glasses, for example? Sorry if it’s not really possible to do so. It’s just very interesting to me!
So, for my normal color vision it’s as though the saturation for red and green is reduced by about 75%. I can distinguish between very bright samples of red and green, but the more mellow tones just kind of wash out. Likewise for colors that contain red/green: for example, purple will wash out to blue unless its very bright.
With the glasses on, it’s as though someone put a mild pink/purple filter on and pumped up the saturation to be only -10% or so; its a lot easier to tell what color I’m looking at. Oranges in particular are extremely vivid.
I had them on when I was bringing groceries out to the car one time and I had a pot roast that I was loading into the trunk. I didn’t have the sunglasses on in the store, but I put them on while leaving. Normally meat looks brown to me, and it was genuinely shocking to see the bright red blood; I briefly wondered what was wrong with it before I remembered I was wearing the glasses.
Very interesting, thanks! I wonder how it makes things appear more saturated if it’s just mildly tinting everything pink.
Supposedly it blocks out the in-between colors that muddy up perception.
If we use sound as an analogy, it would be like putting a high-pass filter on a busy signal so that you can better perceive the high end without the other sound waves changing the fundamental.
Yeah but you lose a lot of colour perception too. Plus anything with a narrowband colour (like an LED) outside of the narrow filter is practically totally filtered out
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I suppose that microwave sensation to the brain might have been Enchroma bending my thoughts and experiences to their will.
I’d not considered it until I read your accusation. Thank you for bringing the possibility to my attention; I’ll listen for another sizzling sound in my ears.
If people would think about the claim for 2 seconds, they might realize that glasses cannot project color into your brain that your eyes literally can’t see.
Imagine trying to see something while your eyes are closed by putting on glasses. If your eyes can’t physically see the light, glasses won’t fix that.
What they can do is block certain light that overlaps in some of your rods and cones (colorblind) in your eyes allowing you to distinguish between colors you previously could not.
Not magic. Just pyshics. They do not fix the issue but it gives your brain new information that was previously obscured. Then your brain can use this info to distinguish between the two overlapping wavelengths that you previously could not.
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I can fuck up your vision through drugs, none of which actually affects the physiology in your eyes.
So? Thus? Therefore? I can fuck up your vision by poking out your eyes, none of which actually affects the physiology in your brain. Both of those are nonsense statements in the context of this discussion.
The brain is the one that transmogrifies the light and reassembles your world.
It’s involved, but so are all parts of the eye and the visual nerve connecting them to the brain. I still fail to see how this is relevant.
It’s the brain that puts it all together. And that processing matters.
Not to (most) colour perception, that happens in the eyes and the visual nerve. For example our cone cells would be perfectly able to perceive ultraviolet light, but for most people it never reaches them because the lens of the eye filters that wavelength. There are people born without a lens, and they can indeed see ultraviolet light.
And glasses can’t help you. Even if you somehow fixed your cones to see colour, your brain would still be left in the dark. It’s… complicated. More complicated than putting a film over your eyes.
Well that might be true, if your entire premise wasn’t wrong from the outset. You don’t fix the cones, you fix the light. You take light of a wave length that would be indistinguishable to the cones, refract it, and then you have light of a wave length that is distinguishable by the cones. No brain or eye surgery necessary.
It’s a scam.
Enchroma? Yes. But not because they sell something that doesn’t work, but because they sell something that does work for some colour blind people at inflated prices while lying about what it does exactly.
I have not tried these glasses. I would not pay that much for them.
What I have found is that inexpensive mirrored “fishing” sunglasses make certain colors much more noticeable for me, especially from a distance. The orange or green mirrored lenses seem to do the trick.
It was an accidental discovery on my part. I bought a “cheap” $20USD pair of polarized fishing sunglasses one year before going on a trip to the mountains in the fall (when leaves change color). Other people can easily distinguish red trees way off in the distance, I couldn’t. But when I had the polarized fishing sunglasses on, suddenly I could very easily distinguish between red trees versus the ones that were brown, dead, or leafless. It was fascinating.
It also works in the spring on newly emerging buds, which are often red or pink in color. From a distance, I can’t really see that. But with the glasses on, I could see the red trees from miles away.
So, for $20 it’s a cool novelty to have some of my color vision “restored”. But for the ridiculous cost of these “color blind glasses”, it would not be worth it to me.
The balloon ones are funny, like "hey Carl, how’d ya know the color of Purple, Carl?
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It’s a good video. Many great YouTubers have to play the “clickbait thumbnail” game to actually get views or else YouTube won’t promote them to even their own subscribers.
Even a huge YouTuber like Marques Brownlee has pointed out that their videos with more “clickbait” thumbnails get more views.
