The colorblind Michigan saw the world through a new lens on Saturday afternoon.
Standing on the hills of William G. Milliken State Park, overlooking the Detroit River, Eric Holland saw red leaves and purple flowers for the first time.
Usually to him everything looks like a green blob, he said. Overlapping colors makes it difficult to distinguish between them.
The world just got a little brighter with his new EnChroma glasses.
EnChroma creates lenses that use special optical filters to help colorblind people perceive a wider range of colors and see more “clear, vivid, clear”. According to the company, 1 in 12 males and 1 in 200 female girlfriends are color blind, totaling about 425,000 Michigan residents.
Two Metro Detroiters, Holland and PJ Bertoli, were given personalized glasses at the event, along with two landscape viewers made for colorblind people installed in the park.
Two EnChroma “Special Spotting Scopes” are planted in the ground on a hill for all to see. The Geostationary Telescope was funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge.
Ron Olson, DNR’s chief of parks and recreation, said the company plans to deploy more EnChroma special viewers to parks across the state.
“They really add great features for colorblind people and make accommodations here better for everyone,” he said.
Veltri, a 32-year-old theater technical director, said he was blown away by the glasses when he first bought them in 2016.
He said he got used to being colorblind, but it still affects his daily life. I have.
“When I’m playing Wordle, it’s the green and yellow boxes, and if it’s midnight, I don’t know what they are,” he explained. “And thankfully someone put a colorblind mode on it, so now it’s blue and orange.”
He said it’s a common misconception that all colorblind people can’t see colors.
“I can still see color,” said Vertoli. “The sky is blue and the grass is green. It may look a little different to you. (Colors) overlap and cause more problems.”
Holland first discovered he was colorblind when he took the military entrance exam at age 17. He’s been wanting glasses with this technology for a while, and it seems they’re slowly becoming more available.
“I’ve always loved autumn colors, so I might head north when autumn colors start to appear.
Wearing glasses in real life isn’t like the videos you see online of colorblind people falling to the ground and immediately crying, Veltri said. It takes him a minute or so to adjust, but then everything starts to become more vibrant, revealing bursts of color that weren’t seen before.
“I don’t want to take them off.”
Contact Emma Stein at estein@freepress.com and follow her on Twitter @_emmastein.
Comments
Post a Comment