Dankam

[LINK TO BLOG ENTRY ABOUT DANKAM]

DanKam is an augmented reality application for the color blind. It assists its users in determining colors, or differences in colors, that would otherwise be invisible to them. DanKam is based on a theory of the human visual system which states that somewhere in the human visual system, processing is done on the pure color — the hue — of something seen. The thinking is that there are relatively few hues the visual system actually sees, but for the color blind, hue determination (specifically between red and green) is impeded by slight changes in the eye. So DanKam, through its various modes, attempts to make hues easier to detect and differentiate.

Notes:

As experimental technology, DanKam is designed to allow an unusual amount of “tweaking”, in the hopes that users will discover particularly effective settings.

DanKam is presently optimized for the most common form of color blindness, Anomalous Trichromancy, which is not actually blind to any particular color but represents a lessened ability to differentiate certain reds from certain greens.

DanKam does send anonymous usage statistics to a central server. Set “Send Statistics” to “No” in the Advanced screen to disable this.

Basic Settings:

Mode: The leftmost bottom button, this flips between a number of filter modes. These include:
* Unfiltered
* HueQuantize: Convert all colors to Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, Magenta
* HueQuantizeRG: Convert all colors between Red and Green to Red, Yellow, or Green-Cyan
* Daltonize: Make reds pinker, while increasing the strength of green
* MaxS: Increase the saturation of colors
* MaxS+HQ: MaxS, plus HueQuantize. The “brute force” solution.
* MaxSV: MaxS, plus all pixels are made as bright as possible.
* H->V: Red through Magenta, translated to Black through White
* HueWindow: Show only a few colors at once, based on the slider.

Slider: Above the bottom buttons is a slider that alters settings of each filter, in a filter dependent way.

White Balance: The human visual system is famously skilled at determining whether something is a given color because of the way it reflects light, vs. the nature of the light around it. This is relatively hard for computers, especially one that will take a red tinge and convert it into a hard red. Enabling White Balance attempts to look at a scene and guess, from the popularity of certain colors, what might be coming from the environment.

Light: This turns on the iPhone Flash, thus providing a clean predictable source of light (and thus improved color determination).

Freeze: This freezes the camera.

Change Image: DanKam can operate on either camera, one of a number of built in images, or any image in the user’s Photo Library. The Ishihara tests are over a hundred years old, and are the gold standard for detecting color blindness. The Color Wheel is quite useful for seeing exactly what is happening, filterwise.

Advanced: In here are some obscure but potentially useful settings. They allow the user to control:

Boundary Settings: …at what point a color is no longer seen as Red, Orange, Yellow, etc.
Display Settings: …how an interpreted Red, Orange, Yellow, etc. is displayed
HueWindow Width: …how many hues to display at once during HueWindow mode
HueWindow Scale: …to what degree non-displayed hues are still allowed to be faintly visible
HQ Sat Spike: …how much saturation is increased during Hue Quantization
WhiteBalance Divisor: …how powerful the White Balance effect can be (at the cost of throwing away data)

Reset: Set all values to normal.

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