Category Archives: news

do glasses for colour blindness work?

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For a while there have been coloured lenses on the market that claim that to make colour blindness better. I have my doubts about this. I have tested some of these glasses in my own research and found that they do not work. So I was interested to hear of work by Rebecca Mastey and Richard Schultz at University of Wisconsin-Green Bay that also finds that the products do not work. The researchers tested products from with 27 men with genetically confirmed red-green colour blindness.

The O2 Amp glasses showed some improvement with deuteranomalous observers and deuteranopes, no improvement was found for protonopes whilst the EnChroma glasses had no significant impact on the red-green colour discrimination of any of the participants. The work was presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology in Seattle.

“The data confirm that these glasses don’t work,” says Dr. Carroll. “In fact, they make some aspects of your vision worse.”

Out of interest, there is also this personal story about a guy with anomalous trichromacy who tested some glasses from EnChroma and fond they made no difference at all.

The future of colour is quantum

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Although our digital displays can show literally millions of colours in fact they show us less than half of the possible colours in the world. This is partly because of the reliance on trichromatic devices – what you probably know as RGB. No matter how we choose them, it is impossible to mix together three colours and make all of the other colours. This is despite this embarrassing statement on the BBC website:

Red, yellow and blue are primary colours, which means they can’t be mixed using any other colours. In theory, all other colours can be mixed from these three colours.

This is just plain wrong. It is not the case that in theory, all other colours can be mixed from these three colours. In theory, and in practice, they cannot.

But I digress. The point is that using a three-colour primary system – a trichromatic system – is never going be able to reproduce all of the possible colours in the world. But even if we do use three, we could do better than the current TVs, phones and tablets on the market if we could improve our technology. The problem is that the red, green and blue lights in these displays are not as bright and colourful as they could be. That is where quantum dots come in.

Quantum dots are tiny crystals that can be precisely tuned to efficiently produce very specific colours. The crystals are grown from a mixture of various semiconductor materials and liquid solvents. By carefully controlling the conditions, engineers can adjust the size of the crystals, which determines the wavelength of the light that the crystals emit. Smaller quantum dots, with a diameter of two nanometres (two billionths of a metre) or so, emit short-wavelength, or blue, light. Bigger dots, with diameters closer to eight nanometres, produce light that’s nearer the long-wavelength, or red, end of the spectrum. We can expect to see new technology on the market soon offering brighter and more colourful displays.

green light may cure your headache

nature, news, technology, , ,

I get migraines. Not often. Just a few times each year. But when I get one I have been known to turn off the lights and go to sleep in my office. I have found that taking a pain killer and then going to sleep is the only way to relieve my symptoms. But a study in the journal Brain suggests that exposure to green light actually has a beneficial effect.

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In the study 80 percent of subjects reported intensification of headache with exposure to high intensity of light, except green. Surprisingly, the researchers found that exposure to green light reduced pain 20 percent. They also found that the signals generated in the retina for green light are smaller than those signals generated for red and blue light. Researchers are now trying to develop a more affordable light bulb that emits pure narrow-band wavelength of green light and sunglasses that can block out all colours of light except narrow-band green light.

clothes that change colour

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Colour-shifting threads that change their hues in response to electrical charges are being developed as part of Google’s Project Jacquard. The technology still has a way to go before it could be in the shops but it gives the potential that your could change the colour of your clothes with the ‘flick of a switch’ rather than buying new ones or even that clothes could change colour with your mood. As if that would be a good thing.

For more see here.

Looking for colour blind people

knowledge, news, ,

colour blind example

Most colour blindness is hereditary. The faulty ‘gene’ for colour blindness is found only on the X chromosome. You have two X chromosomes if you are female or an X and a Y chromosome if you are male. It is because females have two copies of the X chromosome that they are far less likely to be colour blind. A male inherits his X chromosome from his mother and his Y chromosome from his father. So men do not inherit colour blindness from their fathers but from their mothers who can be carriers if they have one faulty X chromosome. Snoooooooooze. Probably you are bored reading this. The real point of this post is to say that Bradford University in the UK are studying colour blindness and are seeking females who are not colour blind but who have a child or a sibling who is. If this sounds like you please get involved in the study, help someone get their PhD, and maybe find out something interesting and useful. For more details see here.

colour helps you sleep

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Light in our natural environment tends to be bluer first thing in the morning and redder at dusk.

Researchers from the University of Manchester looked at the change in light around dawn and dusk to analyse whether colour could be used to determine time of day. They constructed an artificial sky beneath which they placed mice and they then measured the body temperature of the mice for several days and their body temperature was recorded. The highest body temperatures occurred just after night fell when the sky turned a darker blue – indicating that their body clock was working optimally. When just the brightness of the sky was changed, with no change in the colour, the mice became more active before dusk, demonstrating that their body clock wasn’t properly aligned to the day night cycle.

According to Dr Timothy Brown: “This is the first time that we’ve been able to test the theory that colour affects the body clock in mammals. It has always been very hard to separate the change in colour to the change in brightness but using new experimental tools and a psychophysics approach we were successful. What’s exciting about our research is that the same findings can be applied to humans. So in theory colour could be used to manipulate our clock, which could be useful for shift workers or travellers wanting to minimise jet lag.”

measure colour with your smartphone

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This looks interesting. Node is a way to add sensors to your iOS device. It allows you to measure all sorts of things, including colour if you have the node+chroma combination. The node costs about £100 and the additional sensors cost about £50 each. I am not sure how much the chroma sensor costs.

You can find further details here – http://variableinc.com/chroma-contact/

curved displays are the future

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Yesterday I spoke an an event to launch Samsung’s latest curved screen displays. The technology is really gorgeous and everyone who attended was wanting one of the new displays after seeing them.

I am convinced that curved screens will become ever more popular in the future because not only do they look good but they offer serious advantages for users who undertake intensive tasks – the sort of tasks that need a large desktop display rather than a mobile device. When it comes to desktop displays it is really quite simple – bigger is better.

Many people – and I am one of them – are what is known as ‘double screeners’. I have two screens attached to my desktop and my operating system is spread seamlessly across them because I wanted more screen space to work in. I recently carried out a survey – you can find more details here – which showed that 38% of British office workers are already using two or more screens attached to their desktop computers.

Of course, in an ideal world one very large screen would be better than two smaller screens. But there is a problem with most flat-screen technology which is that the LED/LCD pixels emit light straight out but emit a lot less light at an angle to the screen. This means that you look at a large flat screen the light reaching your eye from the edges of the screen is a lot less. Not only that but, because you are looking at the screen at an angle, text and other fine details can be distorted at the edge. Curved displays get around this problem and I am hoping to replace my two flat screens soon with a single Samsung curved display.

With a curved display the distance from the eye to the screen is the same across the whole display and the angle of view is also constant. Not only does this solve the colour and acuity problems I just mentioned but it means that users need to need fewer eye and neck movements. Given that many of us spending longer using a display than we do actually sleeping this could have a big effect on user well-being.

Our survey also showed that about 60% of office workers think it is important that the office technology they use looks good. This can help to motivate them and help them to feel good about themselves. The new Samsung curved displays certainly will satisfy these people.

What colour is the sky on mars?

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The cameras never lies. Or does it? Recently I had to take a photo for a medical case and before submitting it I had to sign to say that the photo had not been modified. I did this – but it was ridiculous of course. Many people have this idea that the cameras faithfully captures what the scene looks like and that, unless we intentionally manipulate the images (in photoshop, for example), then we have captured the truth. Nothing could be further from the truth – as the recent image of #TheDress showed.

The top photo above was taken and released by NASA in 1976 and shows a Martian landscape. The sky is blue. However, at the time, Carl Sagan said “Despite the impression on these images, the sky is not blue…The sky is in fact pink.”

You see the original image had not been colour corrected. Colour correction is a process that takes place on most cameras these days without the user being aware of it but in 1976 was not automatic. The process can compensate for the spectral sensitivities of the camera sensors (which may differ from one camera to another) or for the colour of the light source. The second picture (above) shows the colour-corrected image. Some people are now arguing, however, that the amount of colour correction applied by NASA is wrong and that the sky should not be as red as it appears on the second photograph. For the full story including some other nice images of Mars see here.