Glasses give us new power to see colours

• Autores: Chris Baraniuk
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3118, 2017, pág. 10
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • It's sometimes practically impossible to tell similar hues apart, even placed side by side. Special glasses could improve humans' ability to do so, and could one day help to spot counterfeits. Devised by a team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the glasses basically enhance the user's color vision. They allow humans to see metamers--colors that look the same but give off different wavelengths of light--as recognizably distinct hues. To make the glasses, Mikhail Kats and his colleagues designed two color filters, one for each eye, that strip out specific parts of the blue light spectrum. The team hypothesized that giving each eye slightly different information about blue things would simulate a new set of blue cones, making any subtle color differences more pronounced. They were right. They tested the effect using blocks of color, displayed on a computer and smartphone screen, that people see as metamers.