Special glasses that were originally designed to protect doctors’ eyes from lasers and help them differentiate human tissue have now proven useful for another purpose – helping those suffering from colorblindness see things in a way that had never previously been possible.
The glasses are produced by a company called EnChroma Labs, and as Popular Science pointed out, they originally went on sale three years ago. Although they may look like normal sunglasses, they contain a filter that absorbs light where the spectra overlap the most, essentially forcing the frequencies of light detected by the cones of a person’s eye to be separated.
Those cones are receptors that allow a person to pick up red, blue, and green pigments, but in a colorblind individual, the cones pick up colors with spectra that overlap, making it difficult for them to differentiate between red and green. All other parts of the visual system, including the connections between the retina and the brain, are unaffected and function normally.
Wearing the glasses boosts the pigments and makes it possible for the colorblind to distinguish between them more clearly. The website emphasizes that the glasses do not cure colorblindness any more than regular glasses cure near or farsightedness, but they are helpful tools.
How surgical glasses became a hit among the colorblind
So how did glasses designed to protect the eyes of surgeons wind up being marketed primarily to the colorblind? According to the New York Times, inventor and avid Ultimate Frisbee player Don McPherson was at a tournament when he lent a pair of the glasses to a colorblind friend.
That friend said that he could make out the color of the orange cones used to mark the goals for the first time. That piqued McPherson’s interest, and while he said he did not know the first thing about the condition, he wanted to figure out why the glasses would such an effect. He applied for a grant from the National Institutes of Health in 2005 to study color vision and colorblindness.
In an attempt to create filters that could correct the condition, he worked alongside vision experts and a mathematician and computer scientist named Andrew Schmeder, the newspaper said. They were not the first to explore the concept of glasses that could improve pigment detection, and the $700 device was not initially very successful, due to the steep price and poor marketing.
However, they worked to reduce the costs while creating a similar product. They brought in a new manufacturer that made the process more cost-efficient and tweaked the filters so that the lenses could be used in prescription lenses. They relaunched in December at a new lower price range of $330 and $430, and started offering indoor, outdoor and children’s versions.
EnChroma Labs co-founder Tony Dykes told the Times that the company the glasses will not work for everyone, and that the company had a 30-day return policy in case they do not work for a specific person’s colorblindness. “It works in some cases and not others,” he explained. “It’s not a magical cure or a cheat.”
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Feature Image: Valspar Paint/YouTube
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