Real-Time Mobile Personalized Simulations of Impaired Colour Vision

Colour forms an essential element of day-to-day life for most people, but at least 5% of the world have Impaired Colour Vision (ICV) - seeing fewer colours than everyone else. Those with typical colour vision find it difficult to understand how people with ICV perceive colour, leading to misunderstanding and challenges for people with ICV. To help improve understanding, personalized simulations of ICV have been developed, but are computationally demanding (so limited to static images), which limits the value of these simulations. To address this, we extended personalized ICV simulations to work in real time on a mobile device to allow people with typical colour vision greater freedom in exploring ICV. To validate our approach, we compared our real-time simulation technique to an existing adjustable simulation technique and found general agreement between the two. We then deployed three real-time personalized ICV simulations to nine people with typical colour vision, encouraging them to take photos of interesting colour situations. In just over one week, participants recorded over 450 real-world images of situations where their simulation presented a distinct challenge for their respective ICV participant. Through a questionnaire and discussion of photos with participants, we found that our solution provides a valuable mechanism for building understanding of ICV for people with typical colour vision.