How The Technology Behind Color Blind Glasses Actually Work
More than 300 million people in the world are color blind.
For color blind people, the world can appear grey and dull. Some colors are indistinguishable, such as purple and blue. Imagine if you couldn't see all the colors in a sunset; red appears brown, red and green traffic lights look white; peanut butter appears green; and pink looks grey.
Around 300 million people worldwide are color blind; one in 12 men (eight per cent) and one in 200 women (0.5 per cent). Most color blind people are only partially color blind because they can still see colors, but they see only a narrow range of colors.
According to Vanessa Honson, Optometrist from UNSW Optometry Clinic, instead of 'color blindness', it's more accurate to say 'color deficiency' or 'color weakness.'
"Color blindness is typically inherited genetically and carried recessively on the X chromosome. A father can't pass his red-green color blindness on to his sons. But if a woman is red-green color blind, all her sons will also be color blind," Honson told The Huffington Post Australia.
For decades, there have been glasses that claim to help the color blind. They typically use a pink or reddish-tinted lens that means you're essentially looking through a red or pink pane of glass.
But now there are color blind glasses that feature sophisticated technology that has had astounding results.
For much of his career, Arsham favoured grey.
But, after using the colour blindness glasses, he unveiled his first exhibition in full colour.
"Color blindness doesn't mean that I don't see color. It means that the range of color is drastically reduced, especially in low lighting scenarios or at times where you might have colors that are close to each other on the color spectrum," Arsham told Semaine.
"So what these lenses do is refract the light in a different way so it separates the colors further apart on the color spectrum. It's not actually curing it; what it's doing is tricking your eye into reading more variation."
A CEO Andy Schmeder told HuffPost Australia they've created a special patent-pending optical technology ('multi-notch' filtering) that removes small slices of light where the red and green cones in the retina overlap the most for the color blind.
"A website were researched through three US National Institute of Health (NIH) research grants and 10 years of R&D and clinical studies using scientific color vision tests such as the D-15," Schmeder said.
"The glasses enhance the vibrancy and saturation of certain colors and improve color discrimination, depth and detail perception without distorting the colors the color blind already see well."
While the glasses are not a 'cure' for color blindness, they've been shown to be effective for about four out of five red-green color blind people.
"We hear from parents who tell us their child is now more confident in school because they can better see the colors in a social studies map or tell the difference when their teacher writes in red, green or purple marker on the board, or that they enjoy doing art more because their classmates don't laugh anymore because they're no longer coloring the sky purple instead of blue," Schmeder said.