
Enhancement of human color vision by breaking the binocular redundancy - mxfh
https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04392
======
louprado
I couldn't help but remark on this. I posted the following comment 418 days
ago. I am sure this is a case of simultaneous ideation.

3 points by louprado 418 days ago | parent [-] | on: Life in Technicolor – One
month wearing color blin...

While many of us are not "color-blind", we are all color challenged. This is
because we only have three cone-types, assuming you aren't a tetrachromat.

I had a thought experiment: Suppose you breakup visible light into six bands.
You then create two filters based on these bands. One filter would pass only
bands 1, 3, and 5. The other filter would pass bands 2, 4, and 6.

Now suppose you put one filter over your left eye and the other filter over
your right. Over time, could you learn to see the world in hexachromatic color
?

~~~
Darthy
By the way, that's exactly how the Dolby 3D system works. You could try this
out just with their standard glasses. Maybe you would have to create custom
ones with more pronounced frequency differences, though.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_3D](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_3D)

~~~
jlebrech
maybe this explain why some of us can't handle 3D movies, they might be
partial tetrachromats?

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dghughes
Isn't there some trick where you don't consume the usual type of vitamin A but
instead only consume one of the other three types of vitamin A? The one that's
slightly different and somehow you get night vision?

Actually I don't think it was night vision I think maybe it was to see UV
light.

Maybe I only dreamed this not read about it I tend to do that sometimes.

edit: It was vitamin A2 and it was for night vision actual IR not to see in
the dark but to see IR light. [http://www.popsci.com/article/diy/can-we-hack-
our-vision-see...](http://www.popsci.com/article/diy/can-we-hack-our-vision-
see-infrared-naked-eye)

~~~
abandonliberty
Interesting.

Carrots/Vitamin A were credited with the RAF shooting down enemy planes in
WWII - Apparently a cover story for radar.

[http://gizmodo.com/carrots-improve-your-vision-is-a-wwii-
lie...](http://gizmodo.com/carrots-improve-your-vision-is-a-wwii-
lie-1633939494)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
So the cover story could have been right in this respect and we could have
unwittingly given the Nazis a minor advantage? Weird.

~~~
andai
The cover story was a cover story!

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dynofuz
I already see in slightly two different colors in each eye. One is more of a
blueish hue, the other more ruddy. I'm an artist and in color tests, I get the
best marks. My friend who's a photographer also has the same condition and
excellent color acuity. Anyone else experience this?

~~~
hrnnnnnn
I often notice this effect when lying in bed with one eye open, and the other
closed on the pillow.

The closed eye will be bluer, the open redder. My own theory (backed up by
nothing but a hunch) is that the closed eye adjusts its white-balance to
compensate for the red light coming through the eyelid by becoming bluer.

~~~
SomeHacker44
This. You can try it on a bright day easily by alternating your open eye, and
closing both with hands over them for a while to reset the phenomena. I
discovered it decades ago on an extremely bright day where I couldn't keep
both eyes open without discomfort.

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taneq
That's really really cool. I thought it might be related to how glasses for
colour-blindness work (eg.
[http://enchroma.com/technology/](http://enchroma.com/technology/) \- just the
first one I found) but apparently they just use lenses with a specific
transmissive spectrum to let through mostly lower frequency reds and higher
frequency greens to improve differentiation.

I wonder if you could combine the two to give even more spectral resolution?

~~~
XaspR8d
These filters were already optimized so the sum of their stimuli would match
the tristimulus. (So you still perceive the same baseline as normal
trichromats but with another asymmetry on top.) By removing a frequency range,
you're just losing information and deviating from the standard perception, so
I don't think it increase resolution, unless you were proto- or deutero-weak
and needed the distinction boost anyway.

They do touch on expanding this by splitting all 3 photopigments, but that
would be a much more challenging filter to make.

I was thinking that an active display could add more resolution by adding some
time-dependent dimension to colors. Say, "high" reds/blues/greens would pulse
quickly and "low" ones would pulse slowly... sort of a fourier transform
aspect going on that could get you some scalar gradability rather than a
straight up "left blue" vs "right blue" contrast.

It's all really cool though regardless.

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derefr
Does the result of wearing such a filter match, in differentiable metamers,
the type of vision natural human tetrachromats have, or is it different? If a
natural tetrachromat wore these glasses, would they then be effectively a
pentachromat?

------
buschtoens
Just so I understood correctly: both eyes would see slightly different images
and the brain would merge them to one coherent image with "new" colors? How
long does it take for the brain to adapt?

~~~
db48x
"Subjectively, we observed that, by looking at a particular color through both
filters simultaneously (e.g. filter 1 over the left eye, filter 2 over the
right), a “meta-color” is observed, which appears to be different from the
original perceived color and both individual filtered perceived colors. This
meta-color is a manifestation of the “extra” effective cone type created by
the pair of filters, and demonstrates the increased information relayed to the
visual system resulting from the partitioning of the S cone."

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addled
I get that color resolution would be increased, but wouldn't everything viewed
get a green/red cast since the amount of blue signal to the eyes is cut in
half?

You can even see in their sample images that blues become different shades of
teal.

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yk
On a scale of $.99 mail order "X-Ray" glasses to cyborg, how significant is
this?

~~~
vhhuhhfryuhgfh
Sounds like butterfly level vision (4 cones)

~~~
chillingeffect
Seems like it could be expanded to a total of 6 cones, three per eye? what a
time to be alive :)

~~~
jcl
Curiously, it seems hexachromacy is already within the realm of biological
possibility for human females.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentachromacy#Animals_that_are...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentachromacy#Animals_that_are_potentially_pentachromats)

~~~
ConceptJunkie
I'm holding out for dodecachromacy like the mantis shrimps have.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp#Eyes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp#Eyes)

------
PepeGomez
I once made glasses that made me see polarization. It made plant leaves look
beautiful.

~~~
rocqua
I came here to suggest this. Great to hear that someone actually tried it and
found it to work.

Did it take long to get your mind to 'get' it? Did the effect fade? What
polarization filters did you use?

~~~
PepeGomez
More or less immediately, as far as I can remember. I used polarizers from an
old LCD display.

------
anigbrowl
Interesting, I'll have to do some experiments with this. I thought I knew
about color from years of working with photoshop and video editing, but
working with the pigments and medium of paint is vastly more complex (and
satisfying despite the unpredictability). I've wondered about the spectral
components I can't see quite a bit, since I like to work outside when the
weather is good and some color decisions attract lots of insect interest.

------
bitshiffed
I didn't realize we have so much red-green overlap; like we barely qualify as
trichromats.

That Cyanistes Caeruleus sensitivity graph is beautiful, even without the
fourth cone.

~~~
kmill
I think that overlap just means we are _very_ sensitive to color variation for
radiation around 550nm.

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amelius
This doesn't work when looking at infrared images in the dark: only one eye
will be able to focus, and getting a coherent 3d image will be impossible.

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stared
I used to wear glasses with polarization filters - with a different axis (by
90 deg) for each eye. That way I could see polarization.

Though, it was fine for exploration, for longer exposure it was "blinking" and
overstimulating.

------
speps
Reminds me of this paper I found a few years ago :
[http://caoxiang.net/papers/chi2012_beyondstereo.pdf](http://caoxiang.net/papers/chi2012_beyondstereo.pdf)

------
nikita-leonov
So where can I buy one?

~~~
XaspR8d
Here's filter #1. [1]

Filter #2 was custom-made. Not sure if that's orderable in small quantities
outside of academia. But you could try to find a filter that fit their "naive
approach", which would be simple bandstop (aka "reject" or "notch") filter
that blocks approx 450-510nm. Just looking around the same retailer, maybe
something between these two ([2] & [3]) might suffice for experimenting?
Ideally it would fit that range precisely AND have a rather absolute cutoff. I
have no idea if that kind of arbitrary range selection is available to one-off
buyers, I'm just a fan of color theory. :P

The issue with the naive approach is that it skews the white balance of the
results a bit by affecting the M&L cone stimulus as well, but that's a lesser
issue for playing around with the idea.

[1] - [http://www.omegafilters.com/450lp-
rapidedge.html](http://www.omegafilters.com/450lp-rapidedge.html)

[2] -
[http://www.omegafilters.com/products/filters/500rb.html](http://www.omegafilters.com/products/filters/500rb.html)

[3] -
[http://www.omegafilters.com/products/filters/460-od-0-4-notc...](http://www.omegafilters.com/products/filters/460-od-0-4-notch.html)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Couldn't you achieve the same thing in VR with a camera as long as the camera
was sensitive to the full spectrum and the screen could produce the relevant
frequencies? Just show the limited colour scheme to each eye?

I guess having passive tech is better in a lot of (most) applications.

~~~
rocqua
I think this is how some 3D projection systems work. They have 2 frequencies
for each color, and the glasses filter out one of each frequency. You could
then achieve the same thing semi-passively.

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db48x
An interesting result, although their design turns white into yellow. On the
other hand they do maintain the white balance, which is good.

