New Glasses Have Side Effect of Improving Color Blindness, Too

An unexpected improvement

New glasses that were created to help health care workers seem to also correct color blindness. Theoretical neurobiologist Mark Changizi and his partner Tim Barber initially made a trio of glasses, called O2Amps, to help medical workers find shy veins or to help doctors identify bruising that might not be apparent to the naked eye, but during testing, users (who were among the 8 percent of men and .5 percent of women that have color vision deficiency) reported that the lenses corrected that too. Color blindness, it turns out, comes in two primary varieties: red-green defects and blue-yellow defects. The glasses amplified red-green hues -- but there’s also a downside; they do it at the expense of blue-yellow hues. (Today)

[SUBSCRIBE TO LOOP 21 RSS FEED]