Red/Green Colorblind: Does this look the same?

Jorgen-

These are very close (it’s a bit more difficult a test than with the pseudo-isochromatic plates - see note below). The only difference that jumps out at me is Row 2, Item 5 (“this makes colorblind users cry”). The upper color looks more green to me on the right than on the left. Otherwise, everything else is very close. Nice work. Now, can you make a neuro-typical color simulator? :smile:

Maybe, one day soon, I’ll get this colorblindness thing taken care of.

-Dan

  • As with most (if not all) visual perception, context and expectation play a large role. If the context around a color (the traffic-light is a great example) dictate what a color ought to be, I see it as more that color. (I don’t mean to say that I know the bottom light is green, I actually see it as more green). If you tell me a color is a certain color (black and navy are great examples of this), I can perceive it as more black or more blue. I also believe that there is a linguistic component to color perception as well, though I don’t believe there is any psychophysics work done to back this up. Many languages have elaborate and differentiated words for subtle variations, while other languages have a sparse set (Pulaar, for example, has the same word for blue and purple). I used to work with an interior designer who was, I believe, a “super color seer” - she could see many more shades than even those with normal color vision - she had to make up new words for what she saw.

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A great Radiolab on exactly what you describe: color and language, tetrachromats, and introducing red to a monkey :smile:

Sam: Cool! I’m behind on my Radiolab podcasts…sounds like I need to spend some quality time with Robert and Jad.

Thanks for the great feedback! I am thrilled, both with the results, the eye-opening experience and with having this as a tool now. Again, thank you for the help, all of you!

And please explain, I really didn’t understand this one:

Jorgen-

Just wondering if you could simulate what colors “really” look like to people with “normal” vision…ie: just joking.

-Dan

:slight_smile: I have actually given this some thought during the weekend and I wish I could.
Have you ever tried to look at normal pictures with old fashioned Red-Green (also known as brown-brown by some ;)) 3D glasses? I really don’t know how that would work out, but I imagine it could give a left eye/right eye separation of those two colors, and thus give an impression of difference.

From what I have understood from working with this is that your red and green “sensors” are capturing the wavelength of both red and green, so it should work out.

@dan This came to mind:
I wanted to give you an impression of how big contrasts we see between red and green, and I am sure you have heard that it is about the same contrast as between red/green and blue, but that probably doesn’t help at all, so I figured what if I swap red and blue, and then green and blue and present it. And here is the result. Now you can see how, for us, the red flowers pop out against the green background.

I added both the original and the simulated version (the one to the right) for others to see.
I hope that gives a bit of an impression.

Since these images became a bit abstract, here is another version where I replaced the red color value with blue, and then replaced green with blue.

I can imagine having an iphone app that cycles through these three images, either in this “replace” version or in the previous “swap” version could be a handy and cool tool. And with 1/8 of the male population as customers we could make a few dollars. Wanna start a company?

As you can see, different scenarios can probably benefit from different versions of this. Here keeping the blue skye “blue” makes the most sense.

@holo Thank you! It’s really impressive to see the contrast that way…it’s distinct in the bottom two images in a way that it’s not in the top at all. I’ve tried red-green 3D glasses…I do get some separation, but it’s “difficult” for my brain to deal with :wink:

Yep, my understanding of my medium-wavelength cones are distended toward the red-end of the spectrum.