Microsoft’s New App Lets Colorblind People See The World We See It

People who are colorblind clearly see the world differently from the rest of us. Sure, the unique perspective is interesting and fascinating, but it’s not very practical and can sometimes prove to be dangerous. However Microsoft has recently come up with an app that will be able to deal with this.

Dubbed the Color Binoculars, basically this app uses your smartphone’s camera to adjust objects that it is looking at in such a way that people who are colorblind can see the objects as they were meant to be seen. According to Tom Overton, a Microsoft software engineer, “It’s an app that helps colorblind people distinguish color combinations that they would normally have trouble telling apart.”

He adds, “For example, since I have difficulty distinguishing between red and green, our app makes reds brighter and greens darker so that the difference is more obvious. It replaces difficult color combinations, like red and green, with more easily distinguishable combinations, like pink and green.”

The app will offer three different modes that are catered to the major types of colorblindness, red/green, green/red, and blue/yellow. It also seems that at the moment the app is only available on iOS and we have no idea if there are plans to bring it to Android, but colorblind iOS users will be able to download it from the iTunes App Store.

Filed in Cellphones. Read more about Apps, Health and Microsoft.