
Kaminsky's Next Hack? Colorblindness - taylorbuley
http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2010/12/15/security-guru-launches-iphone-app-to-hack-colorblindness/
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jpablo
As a colorblind myself I don't think this app is really useful.

Most of the time I hardly notice that I'm missing something because of my
colorblindness and when I do notice it 99% of the time it's because someone
pointed it to me because they think I said something stupid (like calling a
sweeter brown when it's actually green).

I just can't see myself trying to view my whole life through an iPhone to see
if I'm missing something..

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sliverstorm
Perhaps this app in itself is limited, but it's a first step. What would you
say to a pair of glasses that did this?

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oostevo
They don't have the adjustability of the app, because they're just tinted
glass or plastic, but ChromaGen already makes contact lenses that do
essentially what the app does.[1]

I'm mildly colorblind myself, but I haven't tried them to see how they work.
The thing is, mild forms of colorblindness really don't affect everyday life
much, so I can't see a point in treating it in most cases.

[1] <http://www.chromagen.us/>

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Vivtek
That's _almost_ reason to get a smart phone just by itself.... but I'm going
to wait for the DNA hack
(<http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/colortherapy/>). I don't want to
have to remember to point a phone at something to distinguish colors; I want
to upgrade my damn retinas.

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dakami
Gene therapy makes me nervous every since it killed that random kid. Looks
like there's some checksumming going on?

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ZoFreX
Link?

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dakami
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Gelsinger>

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jackowayed
Related: I've jokingly said that I'm going to create a "glasses app" where you
tell it your prescription number and it warps the camera's image so that you
see it properly.

I don't think it would be very practical, especially since I think it would be
hard to make it work without dictating the exact distance from phone screen to
eye and from camera to object being viewed. But it would be cool.

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stoney
I'm not sure what you mean here - is it a camera app to bring stuff into focus
or is it a warped screen image to bring your phone into focus? If it's the
first one then I don't think the distance from camera to object is a problem -
cameras can already focus on arbitrary objects, so you can get a clear image
of the target on the phone easily enough. The hard part is from phone to eye,
which I'm not sure is even possible? Can you create a distorted image that
looks right when viewed from a certain point by someone who's short/long
sighted? I suspect you can't do it with today's displays - I think you'd need
to be able to emit different images at different angles (since the angle
between each pixel and my retina will be different and you don't know in
advance where my eye will be relative to the screen).

If your eyes have different prescriptions it's not going to work, but maybe
you could set it up for one eye and just close the other (but then maybe it
would be easier to hold the phone closer to/further from your face).

I wish I could remember enough about optics to figure this out!

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jackowayed
I am saying the former. Yeah, I guess you're right that camera-to-object
distance wouldn't matter.

And you're right that two eyes would be a problem. Even if they have the same
prescription, I think the fact that the angle from the left eye to the screen
and from the right eye to the screen would be different.

It seems like a monocole should be doable, at least if I dictate that they
center the phone in front of their eye and the distance from their eye to the
screen. But I don't know much about optics either.

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stoney
I'm not sure that the refraction of a lens is mathematically
invertible/reversible?

As I understand it, the problem with my eye is that my lens doesn't focus a
point light source (e.g. a pixel) onto a point on my retina - one consequence
of which is that the point source gets smeared out over a larger area (also I
have astigmatism which means my eyes aren't perfectly spherical so colours get
messed up, but lets ignore that!).

You can't fix that smearing by warping the shape of the image, but maybe you
could adjust the brightness of the adjacent pixels to cancel out the smeared
out bit - I guess by making the adjacent pixels a little darker than they
should be. I don't know if that's a solvable set of equations.

If I flip my glasses over and look through the lens backwards, my vision
doesn't get twice as bad - it's actually better than no glasses at all. Not
sure what that tells you other than optics is very confusing to me.

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joshu
I saw Dan demo this at a conference a while ago. I also watched Don Knuth
critique it. Fun stuff.

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taylorbuley
Ha!
[http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3168/3014911710_e31650fd3d.jp...](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3168/3014911710_e31650fd3d.jpg)

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joshu
same conference, different year. also that's not dan.

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DaniFong
Neat. I wanted to build this, and now I don't have to :-p

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GrandMasterBirt
Wow. Lots of respect here. Too bad it can't help when having to do quick
glances.

I like this before/after illustration: [http://blogs-
images.forbes.com/andygreenberg/files/2010/12/b...](http://blogs-
images.forbes.com/andygreenberg/files/2010/12/beforeafterdankam.png) thats
pretty cool because while I can see both images and the numbers in them, the
second is so much more vivid.

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wccrawford
Seems like an idea that's overdue.

I wonder how long until someone invents some glasses that refract just certain
wavelengths to be a little higher? Could be very lucrative.

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icegreentea
Unless I'm hideously misremembering things, air-glass-air refraction will
result in the same wavelength and frequency, just a change of direction.

It just seems to 'change' colours sometimes because its scattering white
light.

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wccrawford
I'm not claiming I know the science of these things, but I think it's just a
matter of time until someone figures out how to do it. Most glasses aren't
made of 'glass' now anyhow. This new technique might be ridiculously more
expensive at first, but I'm sure it'll catch on. It could literally be a
lifesaver for some people.

