Our Color Vision is Limited: Mind in Mind Chapter 4
Why is color vision limited?
Our color vision is limited due to multiple factors. First, we used our eyes in different ways before humanity became civilized. Our eyes have cones and rods which collect lightwaves and turn them into an image in our head. Rods are used to seeing in shallow light, which helped protect us from predators, but now they are almost useless because most areas are saturated in light. Light and shadow can manipulate how colors look since our eyes do not have a way to balance the contrast. This contrast is a significant reason why many colors we see are illusions than actual colors. The light-capturing cones are used to turn different wavelengths of light into colors. These cones can be faulty and, in some cases, not exist at all in a person’s eye. Those faults create differences in the light we should see, which is called color blindness because some colors are removed from the spectrum when the lightwaves are shifted.
My goal
We can say many words to describe any topic deeply, but words are limiting. Words do not always provide the best opportunities to understand a subject. I came up with a diagram to prove that our color vision is limited. The example I want to talk about is colorblindness, as over 230 million people have a variation of it. I am affected by it, and it does make certain things more complex and other things just different. When I get asked what colorblind means, it is easy to explain, but it is hard to show how it affects me and at what severity. In “Our Color Vision is Limited,” I tried several approaches to find the most comprehensive one to talk about this topic.
The Process
The ideation was a relatively rapid process. I developed multiple concepts and eventually landed on my favorite two.
Idea 1
For this idea, I attempted to describe the number of colors that computers can digitally create versus what our eyes are about to distinguish. I tried to break down how monitors use RGB led panels to display color on a monitor. The best monitors can show over 1 billion colors. Still, those colors get filtered by our eyes, and sparsely selected colors can be identified and displayed with preserving shadows and contrast, which can trick the eyes into “seeing” other colors.
Idea 2
For this idea, I wanted to show what a single color can do when a colorblind person sees it. I thought about the simplest way to represent the part of the eye responsible for showing color(cones) and how to show some of the possible colorblind types based on how the light is shifted.
The Prototype
I decided to go for a descriptive app with a better-refined version of my diagram. After user test feedback, it became apparent that the prototype was not having a simple response for users. I made significant reductions in removing all the text I could remove besides the title and labels for the central diagram. I then added more variations to show the more extreme interpretations of colorblindness so that the idea could stick quickly while being visually enjoyable to look at or skim. I think I captured the most amount of information with the least amount of text which was the goal.
