The term "color blindness" is not completely accurate, because it always gives people the illusion that the world seen by color blindness is either black or white (although this situation may exist, the incidence is extremely small and it is called "achromatopsia").
image source: Carson Stafford/viralhog.com/YouTube
There are three types of color-sensitive cells in a typical human eyeball: cone cells that perceive blue, red and green. These three types of cones work together to make people see a colorful world.
However, some people's cones can't cooperate to detect overlapping spectra at the same time, so the number of tones that their eyes can recognize is also reduced.
Based on the different characteristics of spectral overlap, people may suffer from red-green color blindness or blue-yellow blindness; In contrast, the latter is even rarer.
In the following clear and effective illustration, you can see the contrast of these visual defects; However, it needs to be clear that the degree of visual defects varies greatly from person to person.
upper left: normal color vision, upper right: green blindness, lower left: blue blindness, and lower right: red blindness. Image source: Flickr/Johannes Ahlmann/cc by 2.
As you can see, for people with red-green visual impairment, only some colors look completely different, and usually these colors have mud gray and brown tones. They can't tell purple from blue, and they can't see pink at all.
Enchroma is a company dedicated to helping people overcome red and green visual defects. At first, Enchroma's purpose was to invent goggles for doctors undergoing laser surgery; But this kind of goggles was soon used outside the operating room.
Scientists use computer models that can simulate red-green color blindness to design filters. These filters found in Enchroma lenses are in the process of patent application. They can filter out light with a specific wavelength in the visible spectrum, thus amplifying the color signal.
Therefore, the brains of color-blind people wearing these glasses can better distinguish overlapping signals from red and green cones. If you can perceive these wavelengths of light separately, complex color vision will suddenly come into play.
when people put on this pair of glasses for the first time, they all said, how come everything in the world suddenly looks so beautiful!
Surprisingly, for people with normal color vision, Enchroma filter can create a variety of colors in the red-green spectrum, which look extremely colorful and vivid.
The inventor of this kind of glasses emphasized: "What we are talking about here is not a color blindness therapy, more precisely, it is an auxiliary optical device".
As explained above, this technology cannot be applied to blue-yellow blindness; Because people's own unique visual defects are different, the effect of using this kind of glasses is also different.
Nevertheless, for those who can pay high fees (the starting price of adult glasses is $349, and that of children's glasses is $269), it will be a brand-new life experience. Sometimes, you can't help but admire what science has done to improve your life.
This article is the original Tadpole Staff, and the copyright belongs to Tadpole Staff. Any media, website or individual may not reprint it without authorization, otherwise relevant legal responsibilities will be investigated. Please send an email to editor@kedo.gov.cn to apply for reprinting authorization or cooperation.