A crowdfunded device to'fix' colour-blindness?

A crowdfunded device to ‘fix’ colour-blindness? Yes please says Russ Swan – if nothing else it’ll make political distinctions easier…

“For those of you watching in black and white, the green ball is next to the blue”. This snooker commentary has gone down in broadcasting legend, and has been repeated so often I can no longer be sure if I actually witnessed it or have merely created a memory. It’s hard to believe by looking at me, I know, but I am old enough to remember when not all television was in colour.

The phrase leapt back into my consciousness as I looked at a plea from the University of East Anglia to support one of its projects on Kickstarter, a crowd-funding platform. Scientists at UEA have developed a device to ‘enhance’ video so that colour-blind people can get a better impression of colour. Truly we live in a wondrous age, I thought, where our finest minds are able to tackle such a complex issue that can be quite debilitating for a sizeable chunk – about 4% – of the population. That’s 300 million people worldwide.

I had visions (visions!) of super duper goggles of some sort, to address the inability to differentiate some colours. I’ve tried this myself, using a pair of those old-style cinema 3D glasses with the red and green filters. Wearing them, the world really did look 3D (and kind of trippy). Funnily enough, my depth perception actually improved, and the headaches diminished, when I took them off again.

Don’t look at me like that. We both know you’ve done it too.

But alas no, the UEA project doesn’t involve any fancy eyewear (although such things do apparently exist, as the internet will tell you). It must be something closer to the cutting edge of science, surely: a neurological implant of some sort to directly stimulate the colour receptors on the retina, or even the image processing centres of the cortex.

We’re all going to become cybernetic at some point anyway, and this might be an early step towards the creation of Human 2.0, or Homo consectetur. Might as well start by enabling everybody to watch football comfortably, pass the medical to become an electrician, and work out just what that damned universal indicator is actually saying about the pH of that sample.

Yet again I am disappointed, for this is no human enhancement technology. Could it be that this new technology is a bit left-field – something unexpected and truly astonishing? I happen to have been reading about synaesthesia this week, and my brain really wants to join these dots.

People with this condition can experience a sort of sensory cross-over, where for example numbers and letters have inherent colours, or flavours a specific shape. Could UEA have found a way to harness this phenomenon? Will some new nasal attachment allow us all to emulate the young fellow who, by all accounts, sure played a mean pinball?

The reality is rather more prosaic, I’m afraid. The Eye2TV is a video adapter that sits somewhere in a video feed and artificially boosts red and green signals, apparently making them more distinguishable to colour-blind folk while not making them too lurid for the rest of us.

It’s the sort of slightly-dull invention that seems typical of the crowdfunding scene: not quite good enough to be an obvious commercial success, and not quite unlikely enough to be written off as a probable scam (I’m sure such scams do exist, although anything promoted by a bona fide university is presumably not going to fall in that category).

I think they’ve missed a trick, though, for there is an application of this technology that would certainly make it a must-have for most households in the country.

As I write this, the UK is in the midst of a general election campaign that is different to any we’ve seen before. In the old days, politics was characterised on a spatial axis: left – centre – right. This election looks more like something from a primary school art class, with all the colours of the rainbow deployed by those seeking to wield power.

The trouble is, it has been a problem to differentiate those colours. Certainly the blues have looked quite a bit like the purples when some questions are asked, while the purples have gone red in the face at regular intervals. The reds have looked more and more like the blues when certain issues are raised, the old yellow and blue mixture has turned out not to be green after all, but a true green has popped up to compensate.

In other words, it’s a kaleidoscope of confusion in which all the colours look much the same. I for one would pay good money for a simple plug-in device that lets me see each of these tribes in their true colours. Or perhaps I’ll go back to watching in black and white.