Eyeborg Lets Color-Blind Artist Paint in Color

Neil Harbisson is a color-blind artist who can now paint - in color - thanks to a cybernetic device called the Eyeborg which converts 360 colors into different sounds:

As an art student at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, he painted only in black and white because that is all he saw. But three years ago he met Adam Montandon, a cybernetics expert who came to give a lecture at the college.

After the talk, Montandon was told of Harbisson’s condition and he took up the challenge of solving the problem, enabling Harbisson to paint in colour. The artist suffers from achromatopsia – or complete congenital colour blindness.

Montandon decided to harness the way in which different colours reflect light at different frequencies, with light vibrating fastest from violet and slowest from red.

The first device fitted to Harbisson’s head was fairly primitive, letting him “hear” only six colours. His current model is far more sophisticated, giving him access to 360 colours.

Montandon created the Eyeborg system, manufactured by HMC Interactive, the design company in Plymouth that he co-founded. It is a head-mounted digital camera that reads the colours directly in front of it. The camera is connected to a laptop computer, carried in a backpack, which slows down the frequency of light waves to the frequency of sound waves. The computer then sends the “sound” of each colour to an earpiece worn by Harbisson. Montandon expects the system eventually to be as small as an MP3 player.

Link

Previously on Neatorama: The Blind Painter


This is just silly.

I have two different kinds of color blindness and I can use Photoshop to paint in color with ease.

All you need to do is study your color palate and use the numbers that Photoshop assigns to the colors as a guide.

Also i know people who also just use the Pantone color numbers to paint.

Just a a few weeks of study can replace this dubious unwieldy machine. All it is doing is assigning a sound to a Pantone type number that EASILY could just be read as text. Is the user of this sound device was using the pantone numbers he could actually communicate with people who are color professionals, as it is he is invested in a technology that is only of use to him.
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Amazing story!
The big difference between reading the pantone color numbers and harbisson's color device is that reading the colours would only allow him to recognize the colours whereas the cibernetic extension allows him to perceive the colours as an extra sense. It's great!
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Hi, My name is Adam Montandon and I am the inventor of the eyeborg, neils colour blind system. I have written more about it here:
http://www.adammontandon.com/2008/03/bridging-island-of-colourblind.html
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