Color Blind Camera
Description
This camera is designed to show you the world the same way a colorblind person will experience it. Use the dropdown menu to select a type of colorblindness.
Design Process
One of my best friends growing up was colorblind, this has always fascinated and intrigued me immensely but, since we were kids, it was quite difficult for him to describe his experience, and it was as difficult for me to understand it. This assignment allowed me to understand and somewhat experience what he was experiencing.
It is essential to understand how the human eye works and what colorblindness is to understand this camera fully. The human eye uses specialize structures called cones to detect colors; a healthy human has between six and seven million of these cells of witch ~64% are dedicated to seeing red, ~32% green, and ~2% blue. In color blind people, some of these cells are damaged or missing altogether, making them unable to see specific wavelengths.
Colour vision deficiency (CVD) affects approximately 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women, with a total of about 300 million people affected worldwide. CVD can be divided into two major groups: 1) Red-green deficiency. 2) Blue-yellow deficiency. These two major groups can be subsequently subdivided into anomalous trichromat and dichromat. These can be further divided into protanopes, deuteranopes, and tritanopes for dichromats and protanomaly, deuteranomaly, and tritanomaly for anomalous trichromat. The difference between dichromat and anomalous trichromat is that the first can match any color they see with only two primary colors. In comparison, the latest can match with all three primary colors but with some cones in their eyes being less receptive than others.
The assignment turned out to be way more challenging than expected as I could not simply remove one of the r,g,b channels to mimic the desired colorblindness type. The process is a lot more complex and involves quite a lot of math (http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/colorblind/math.mhtml#page-container) since we need to convert four different color spaces from sRGB >RGB>XYZ>LMS (apply the transformation to this color space)> convert step by step back to sRGB. Luckily, I managed to find a color matrix (where the math had already been done) to apply to my camera feed.
Reflection
As an Art Director I never really considered CVD in my practice, this assignment gave me a deeper and better understanding of what colorblindness is and how it affects people. Color is highly subjective, and trying to understand how ordinary people perceive it is hard enough, let alone trying to imagine how colorblind individuals see it. I believe this camera could be a powerful tool for designers, allowing them to easily experience a rather complex disability and design accordingly.