Survey results: "Color Vision and the Efficacy of EnChroma Glasses"

Blake Porter has published the results of his on-line survey http://www.blakeporterneuro.com/color-vision-efficacy-enchroma-glasses/ into the efficacy of EnChroma sunglasses as an aid for compensating for colour blindness. He previously published a fantastic piece entitled "What is color? Enchroma glasses, neuroscience, and the mystery of color" http://www.blakeporterneuro.com/enchroma-neuroscience-color/, which I mentioned in an earlier post http://julianh72.blogspot.com.au/2015/09/fantastic-article-on-enchroma-glasses.html - do take a look at this article, if you have not already done so - it is a fascinating read and very thought-provoking.

A total of 406 people responded to the survey, so it is a useful sample size. A significant majority of respondents were males in their twenties, which is not really surprising - males are more commonly affected by colour blindness than females, and the poll was conducted as an on-line survey, so some internet-savvy was required to even be aware of the poll, and then to complete it.

And the results of the survey?

In a nutshell - they really do work, for the majority of users.

http://i1.wp.com/www.blakeporterneuro.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/EnChroma-effective-time.png


You really need to read the whole article to get the full picture, but the Conclusion sums it up pretty well:

Conclusion

What we may conclude with some certainty is that people who have a language full of color words, are color blind, and then use corrective means to aid their color blindness, new conscious color perceptions are near instantaneous, possibly due to the broad processing capacity of the visual system, and there seems to be an intuition present, possibly due to knowledge from language, allowing these people to correctly assign their new colors with language. Overtime, their processing of new colors and their ability to discriminate across colors will be improved and the time course of this may be age dependent.

The work by Blake Porter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Ultrascope - Open-Source Automated Robotic Observatory

Here's one for the Geeks and Makers:

Ultrascope - an open-source Automated Robotic Observatory:
http://www.openspaceagency.com/ultrascope/
https://www.onshape.com/cad-blog/who-wants-to-go-hunting-for-asteroids

The Ultrascope project (currently in pre-Beta) aims to develop a kit-set robot telescope (or ARO - Automated Robotic Observatory), that will allow amateur astronomers to contribute to citizen science projects for a radically reduced cost - e.g. asteroid hunting, etc.

The first project is the Explorer Series Ultrascope, which is a 90 mm (3.5 inch) reflector ARO that is able to conduct celestial photography and photometry. The kit will be released as open-source plans for 3D printing or laser cutting, paired with an Arduino controller and a high-pixel smartphone (eg Lumia 1020 with 41 Megapixel CCD).

They are also working on a 200 mm (8") version, the Odyssey.