Inspiration
Some time ago we thought about color-blindness and realized how not being able to distinguish certain colors can actually be very dangerous. Especially red-green-blind people are facing a huge challenge in our society: Red is used as the color to express importance (warnings on packages, etc.), to attract attention (fire trucks, fire extinguishers, etc.). Green on the other hand occurs naturally in all sorts of places, is used a lot for packaging (Sprite, ...), and so on.
Our goal was to build a tool bringing back the "sticking out"-experience of the red color to color-blind people.
What it does
Basically, it takes a video of a scene as input (e.g. taken with a mobile phone), processes it by letting red areas flash brightly. To support our development process, especially to have an idea how our post-processing looks like to color-blind people, we also added filters to simulate two kinds of color-blindness. Later we also added a feature trying to detect dangerous situations the person running the app might run into (like accidents) - in production the app would issue an emergency call or similar in such situation.
How I built it
We used HTML5 and WebRTC to build the apps as stand-alone web applications that run on most devices and platforms.
Challenges I ran into
Not having done anything with WebRTC before, it was challenging to accomplish video processing using nothing but HTML and JavaScript. After that, we encountered problems like figuring out how to detect potential dangerous situations as reliable as possible. At another point, we struggled utilizing the compasses built into our mobile devices - as all of where very unreliable, contradicted each other or sometimes changed their mind spontaneously without even being moved. All in all they turned out to be a bad tool to determine a users orientation reliably.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We are quite proud to have created something that might provide color-blind people with some of the extra information most people of our society enjoy every day. It was a huge experience to work on a subject like this and think hard about the problems visually impaired people deal with.
What I learned
We learned a lot about the theory behind the different types of color-blindness and similar conditions. We learned how to use very recent HTML5 technologies to our advantage.
What's next for ColorfulMind
We thought a lot about the way people can use our app and we are aware that carrying around a mobile device all the time is not practical and can actually be dangerous. On the other hand, this would be a perfect app for augmented reality glasses like HoloLens (unfortunately, nothing similar was provided to us during the event). We would love to develop and run our app on a wearable device.
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