14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft Garage has just launched a new iPhone app that’s specifically aimed at color blind people, as it helps them distinguish colors in a photo they take with the camera by automatically adjusting certain colors.
Published in the App Store and available with a free license, Color Binoculars is an app that is based on a very simple approach: color blind users only have to take a photo with the iPhone camera and then let the app automatically apply filters that make colors easier to distinguish.
Color Binoculars supports all three common forms of color blindness, according to the official description published in the store, and can help distinguish even the most difficult color combinations, such as red and green.
Exclusive to iOS
The app is the creation of two Microsoft engineers, one of them suffering from color blindness too and needing an app like this to better distinguish colors.
“It’s an app that helps colorblind people distinguish color combinations that they would normally have trouble telling apart. 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,” Tom Overton, the colorblind engineer, explained.
He teamed up with Tingting Zhu, another Microsoft engineer, who helped him develop an application which they claim “uses the phone’s camera as a way to translate images.”
“For me at least, it’s such a personal project. I showed it off to my family. I have a cousin who is also colorblind, and he really enjoyed it. Also, when I’m cooking and I need to brown meat, I can bust it out so I can tell when it’s not pink anymore!” Overton added.
For the moment, the app is exclusive to iOS, and the two developers explain that it can support any screen size on this operating system, so it can be used on iPads as well. There’s no word on an Android or Windows phone version for the time being.