Color correcting glasses have now been available for a few years, Enchroma being the most competitive firm in this business. While they provide impressive results, wearing glasses is not for everyone and combining color correcting qualities into complex lenses is not always easy.
Now researchers at Birmingham University in the UK have developed a color correcting contact lens that performs tricks similar to commercially available color correcting glasses.
Their technology relies on using a cheap, non-toxic dye made of rhodamine, a material that absorbs certain wavelengths of light. Specifically, a region of the frequency spectrum between the red and green is where rhodamine blocks the most light, avoiding having the colors in that region from triggering red and green optical cones. This improves color perception and the washing of colors onto each other.
“Contact lenses are of interest for colour blindness correction because it is easier to correct the entire field of view,” said Dr Haider Butt, lead researcher on the project. “The dye processing we carried out does not need any complex preparation, it is not toxic to the human eye, and our method could be easily used in both glasses and contact lenses at low cost.”
Study in Advanced Healthcare Materials: Contact Lenses for Color Blindness…