if you're interested

[truepenny]

There's an article here that makes a valiant stab at describing how people with albinism see the world. Literally.

Since, obviously, I've never seen the world WITHOUT albinism, I'd be curious to hear what people who do not have albinism make of it.

Comments

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I'm not certain I agree with the distinction between resolution and blurriness. I read an article about a new way of taking undersea photographs (or something, I'm really not clear on the details after so many years) that had several pictures of the same reef or vent community side by side. One was nine or fifteen or some small number of big pixels, and another had semi-smeary shapes if you knew what you were looking for. The two had the same resolution-- there was no more information to be had from the smeary shapes than from the big squares of color.

I do like the difference between focus blurry and resolution blurry. I shall think a bit and see if I can articulate what I like about it and if I then disagree with the above.

[nycshelly.livejournal.com]

I know one person with albinism and she's legally blind. She's also super sensitive to light and wears sunglasses outdoors, uses a white cane, and she gets around very well. I never thought to ask her exactly what things look like to her. I work with blind and visually impaired people and there are so many differences, from tunnel vision (one of my staff from a few years back has that -- she has Usher's Syndrome and is also severely hearing impaired) to seeing only on the periphery and a whole range in between.

[mmarques.livejournal.com]

That makes sense and is interesting. My cell phone has horrible resolution on the camera. Some pictures come out looking sharp. But I find that pictures that require more resolution (e.g. a non-close-up shot of cherry blossoms) look murky. I'm not sure blurry would be the right word.

[nycshelly.livejournal.com]

I should add that the description in the article is what I would have called blurry. Then again, I have nystagmus, to go along with my nearsightedness and now age-related farsightedness (and actually able to function indoors without the glasses I've been wearing since I was 2 1/2), and most things have a blurred edge. I especially have trouble differentiating numbers in certain fonts or at a distance, ie on eye charts. The 3s, 5s, 6s, 8s, 9s, and 0s often look alike and those zeros with the dot or line in them on computers so they won't be mistaken for ohs are indistinguishable from 8s most times for me.

[mirrorthaw.livejournal.com]

Seeing as how I'm the closest guinea-pig to hand....

We know that my night vision is generally better than yours, which would make sense if the resolution analogy functions at all well. Higher resolution images leading to more information for the brain to process, meaning that I'm more likely to see whatever it is better when it's hard to see at all.

We also know that my vision problems are all about focus. I'm nearsighted enough that I can't really ready without my glasses any more, while that's not so much a problem for you.

Overall, the resolution analogy isn't bad--not perfect, but goes a long way to describing the problem in non-technical terms.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Very interesting. Reminds me of way back when I was a foolish high-schooler and submitted a story to MZB's magazine, and the guidelines specified to not use dot matrix. It's still kind of hard for me to picture, but the examples in the article are pretty helpful.

[blackmonkeymage.livejournal.com]

At first I took your first sentence to mean that the article literally stabbed at the problem, and thought, "That would hurt a LOT."

[frostedelves.livejournal.com]

I find the distinction made between focus and resolution fascinating and useful in trying to understand the article's point. I don't have albinism, but I used to be nearsighted, and I've always wondered how other people see the world anyway. This attempt to describe one instance of someone else's sight reminds me of what happens sometimes due to inherent differences in perception. When I got laser corrective surgery for fairly bad nearsightedness, nobody thought to mention that people with naturally good eyesight focus differently than those who use glasses, and my own change from one type to the other took a lot of getting used to-- before laser surgery, I used to squint and use the muscles around my eyes to make the image I saw sharper, even when wearing glasses. After surgery, that just wasn't how it worked; things were either automatically in focus when I looked at them, or they weren't, and if they were not in focus squinting wasn't going to help. The entire world ended up with very slightly less-sharp edges, although it was not blurry-- I just couldn't fine-tune my focus a little sharper anymore. Since I'm an artist who likes to work with fine details up close, the difference was sort of a kick in the teeth until I got used to it (even though it was a relatively tiny thing, and not really worth whining about). Now, I can't even quite remember what harder edges used to look like... because the edges I see now are definitely not what I would call "blurry," although I know I used to be able to make them even harder. Thus, the idea of lower-resolution vision makes a lot of sense to me as a useful descriptive. Neat article.

It's getting late. Sorry if that wasn't very coherent.

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I'm not at all sure I'd like that. I *like* being able to make the world go away by taking my glasses off.

[issendai.livejournal.com]

The article's description of low-resolution sight sounds a lot like the effect I get when my contacts are too old. My sight's not blurry, but sometimes the small details are there, and sometimes they're just not. If I try, sometimes I can bring parts of the detail into focus, but they're warped, as though they're on the edge of two pixels and Photoshop can't decide how to translate them. Does anyone else get this effect?

[lisatheriveter.livejournal.com]

I have corneal keratoconus - my corneas are gradually becoming more cone-shaped. As a result, I have very little depth perception, and lights cause a halo effect. During the day, or indoors, the world looks very much like a television show. At night, under streetlights, it looks like a comic book. I can see things, but I cannot resolve the colors and shapes into a recognizable pattern. I can't tell the correct perspective, or what things are in the foreground and what are in the background. Shadows may look like bushes, cars may look like buildings, people may look like shadows.

[zodiacal-light.livejournal.com]

Hm. I suppose that makes sense, but the difference between low resolution and blurriness honestly doesn't make much sense to me.

I have garden-variety nearsightedness (as far as I know), but somehow, none of the glasses I've ever been prescribed fully correct my sight, so even with my glasses, things always appear fuzzy around the edges. A low-resolution picture is blurry to me; it's fuzzier, and I honestly can't tell if I'm missing those tiny details because of the resolution of the picture, or my own eyes. I got to that description of low resolution in the article, and the first thing I thought was, "but that is what blurry is."

I'm probably missing something horribly obvious, here.

[liminalia.livejournal.com]

Get checked for astigmatism, maybe even by a new doctor. I've had glasses for nearsightedness since 5th grade, but 3 years ago was I diagnosed with "5 steps" (pretty severe) of astigmatism in my right eye. Getting the correct glasses definitely made a difference.

[zodiacal-light.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the advice. I'm going for another eye exam tomorrow, and due to insurance changes, it's a different doctor. I'm definitely going to be mentioning the problems with the previous glasses. (My last doctor, every time I said that the glasses weren't working, told me it was all eyestrain, which bugged me to no end, because dammit, I know what my eyes are like when I'm straining 'em, and that's not it.)

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I wonder if this might come close:

Imagine that you draw a curve on graph paper or squared paper with a soft pencil. At the moment, it's a smooth curve with sharp edges. If you rub your finger along the line, it will become blurred. For the 'low resolution' version, draw another line that must be as close to the curve as possible but using only the lines printed on the paper. This still has sharp edges, and is still similar to the original curve, but contains less information. Does that work as an analogy? In low-resolution photos, the detail that is lost tends to be in things like fine lines and subtle differences in colour, although I can't speak for other people's eyesight.

For the record, I'm long-sighted. My vision is normal to within a few inches of my nose, although it takes more work to focus on anything within arm's length. If I'm tired, detail becomes harder to see but I've never thought about how to describe the difference.

[zodiacal-light.livejournal.com]

Er... I'm actually not sure it does make sense. Are you saying that, when you're looking at low-resolution photos, you're seeing less, but what you do see is still clear and sharp? (Is trying to wrap her head around low-resolution images, and failing spectacularly...)

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

It can be; it depends, I'm afraid. It often looks different to problems with focus but the result can't always be described as 'sharp'.

The problem with low-resolution pictures is that, to save space, the 'original' picture is approximated with small squares of colour. In small pictures, or from a distance, the difference may not be too noticeable to the naked eye. The more you enlarge the picture, however, the more obvious the differences become, and you may see things like complicated black and white tracery depicted as a series of gray squares, or a gradient of colour approximated with a couple of squares of one shade followed by a couple of squares of a lighter shade. At a distance, some of this may look like 'blurriness' but it's not usually as consistent a blur as a blur caused by focus; 'grainy' might be a better word.

This page (http://www.printingforless.com/resolution.html) contains a sample of text at two different resolutions. You may want to save the .gif files and play around with enlarging them if that makes it easier to see the difference. Neither will be perfect but the letters on the higher resolution picture should have better edges.

[zodiacal-light.livejournal.com]

Hm. See, looking over that page, I'd describe the lower-resolution images as blurry. Grainy works, though, but I'm still not sure I'm getting it.

I don't mean to keep bugging you, but maybe you, or another interested party, could explain what the difference between focused and unfocused is? (Sounds kinda weird, coming from me, but it might help me grasp the difference between bad-focus blurriness and low-resolution graininess.)

Thank you. That's a useful site.

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

I'm sort of running out of words, here. If this doesn't work, maybe someone else could have a go?

If you took the low resolution picture on that website, a perfect representation of that text (where there would be black, white and clear curved lines) and a version of the perfect image but with focus blur, and enlarged them until half of an 'n' took up the whole screen*, I think you should see:

'Perfect image': still only black and white, and a sharp distinction between the two. Parts that should be curved are perfect curves.

'Focus blur': black, white, and grey. Lines that should be curved are still curved. There is a perfectly smooth and even gradient from black to white around all edges.

'Low-res picture': black, white and grey. Lines that should be curved are in fact made up of blocks. There is grey around the black but (again) in solid blocks, and probably not evenly around the edges. Grey is used to get 'smoother' curves by filling in gaps around the black blocks.

*I'm assuming a 'perfect' screen here for example purposes

[zodiacal-light.livejournal.com]

Okay, I think I get it now. The unfocused image is actually blending from one part into another, and the low-resolution image is, hm, actually sort of missing bits at the edges that would be there in the perfect image? Do I have that right?

Thank you very much for putting up with my questions. I know I'm being a bit of a nuisance...

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

Pretty much. Sometimes the 'bits missing' are colours, so that a smooth shading from blue to green can become a small block of blue, followed by a greener block of blue, followed by a block of turquoise, etc. It's basically an approximation of (what we percieve to be, but in fact is not) a perfect image. If the 'blocks' are larger and the number of colours are fewer, the resolution is said to be reduced and the image is more distorted.

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

Oh, and also: I'm happy to answer questions as best I can but I'm by no means an expert on any of this. Add pinch of salt as seems best to you.

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

If they're doing the prescription process properly, there shouldn't be any blurring with glasses on. I've got normal myopia and astigmatism and probably other stuff besides. They have to jump through all kinds of hoops to test my eyes properly, because I'm legally blind without glasses. I figure on an eye exam that actually works taking 2 hours, and I can't drive myself after because they'll dialate my eyes. Very hard to function normally when even a day with a 1000 foot ceiling of heavy stratus clouds is a bright day.

If I attempt to use spherical lenses of something vaguely resembling the right level of correction, everything is blurry and out of focus. Even if the lenses are strong enough, they've got the wrong shape, so nothing looks right.

The problem you're describing could be any number of eye problems. If you're going to someplace like Lenscrafter's for glasses, they're probably not giving you an adaquate eye exam.

[zodiacal-light.livejournal.com]

I've been going to an eye doctor, one who's been checking the eyes of my whole family, grandparents included, for ages. Like I mentioned above, though, I've gone back several times after eye exams to complain about the glasses and I've basically been told that they did the process right and it's just eyestrain, or it'll pass when my eyes adjust, or whatever. It never does, though, so tomorrow I'm going to a new doctor. (Here's hoping...)

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

I had problems similar to what you describe when I was fairly young. My family's eye doctor had never dealt with somone who was so young and whose sight was going so far south so quickly. At age 7 I could still walk around without glasses. By age 12 I was legally blind without them and had a window of around 12" in front of my nose where I could see clearly without glasses. I'm 29 now and basically no longer have any point where I can see an entire object clearly without glasses.

A visit to an opthamalogist at the local teaching hospital gave me a better prescription, and my eye doctor much better tools for getting me a good prescription. I had to learn to put up with getting my eyes dilated every time (even tho I hate the way it feels), and be very careful in my distinctions between blurry and not blurry during parts of the eye exam. They had to learn some new things too, tho I'm less clear on what changed for my doctors.

It may take a bit of arguing, but they *can* do better for you.

[redbird]

I'm nearsighted and astigmatic, and for the most part things aren't blurry. I'd say they fade out sooner than they did when my vision was better: someone will point out, say, a bird in a tree some distance away, and it's not that the bird is a blurry spot instead of an identifiable mockingbird or at least obviously a bird shape, it's that I can't pick it out at all.

(Blurriness happens when I'm tired, or when the eye doctor is trying out different lenses for me.)

[kestrell.livejournal.com]

Thank you for pointing out such an interesting article. When I was low-vision, I used to be driven absolutely nuts by how often and how persistently people asked me this question because 1. I had nothing "normal" to compare it to and 2. people just refused to comprehend when I said glasses absolutely could not "fix" me, the vision just was not there. Even now that I am blind, people keep trying to negotiate "how blind" I am: "but you see light, right?" "but you can see me, right? because you are talking right to me..."
I can't help but feel that questions like this indicate that part of the problem is that normals really want to live in a world where everyone can be "fixed," and that is one of the ways in which I htink disability overlaps with queer studies: the struggle to just be able to say, this is me, stop trying to make me more like you.

One last bit about descriptions of low vision: While I was still low-vision and I discovered the Impressionists, I was so excited that I finally had something I could point to and say, "I see sort of like that," but I have also said it is like wearing a Saran Wrap blindfold.

[zodiacal-light.livejournal.com]

...I'm now contemplating wearing a Saran Wrap blindfold, just for the hell of it, really.

(Sorry. That has absolutely nothing to do with your point.)

[kestrell.livejournal.com]

I'm spending this week working on a collaborative project run by a low-vision artist at MIT, and she is making the sighted people wear glasses smeared with Vaseline in order to convey what she sees. We've also had virtual environments and sonic environments. It's all about trying to communicate our weird personal perspective on the world, which to me connects with science, art, and science fiction. And wearing Saran Wrap blindfolds. Except maybe that's a fashion statement...?

[zodiacal-light.livejournal.com]

That project sounds so cool. I've always wanted to fix my camera (I, er, got a seashell stuck in it at the beach), fiddle with it, and take pictures that capture what the world looks like to me when I take off my glasses. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about cameras to manage that now. (Plus, the seashell's still stuck in there.)

And Saran Wrap blindfolds sound like a fashion accessory worn with duct-tape dresses. But that might just be me.

[kestrell.livejournal.com]

No, it's not just you **considering the business opportunity*...

[oracne.livejournal.com]

That is a nifty article. And it made sense to me.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

That's interesting. While I do have pretty major focus-correction issues, it would make a lot of sense for the limits past which that actually can't be corrected to be resolution issues. Thank you.

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

Hrm, I didn't realize people with albinism see the world differently. That's almost as cool as me not being as blind in low light as I am in bright light :D.

[grave-tidings.livejournal.com]

As someone who is severely nearsighted with astigmatism, this article makes total sense to me because my world has all been blurry without glasses or contacts since I was nine years old. I can't wear soft lenses and as I use a computer all day long, visual acuity is paramount.

I also work in publishing and deal with pixels. Every day I must explain over and over to customers why their 2"x3", 72dpi artwork will not print correctly on a press even as it's perfect for the Internet. High resolution vs. low resolution intrudes on my reality 24/7, I"m surprised my dreams aren't blurred.

Any road, after reading the article it seems to me that albinism is like having exquisitly good taste in wine. You can't tolerate the cheap stuff, but the $25 a glass vintage tastes great. Soooo, you have champagne sight when the rest of the world is satisfied with vinegar.

Mixed metaphor, but there you are.

[mithriltabby]

Interesting. I discovered I was myopic in fifth grade, when I started having trouble seeing the chalkboard in school and reading the destination signs on buses. My optometrist found my vision was 20/40; the world itself seemed pretty sharp, but some distance details fuzzed out. She corrected my vision to 20/20, and suddenly I could read at a distance again. As soon as I got artificial correction, my eye muscles relaxed and my vision quickly went to 20/100 and past (I’m at –3.25 diopters these days), and the world gets blurry about two feet from my face when I don’t have my contacts in. I remember the fascination with which I beheld the world when I tried an overcorrecting prescription to 20/15 vision: I could see the leaves on trees as sharply detailed textures, where previously they had been more a sort of dappled effect. It sounds like albinism has some similarities, but it’s not just focusing— do finely textured objects look smooth to you at a distance of a few feet?

[mincedniku.livejournal.com]

Mm, I had read a similar description of albinism vision several years back, which makes sense, yet at the same time is very hard to imagine when you have no experience in seeing like that. Pixellated computer images are one thing, but to have your whole world like that? I just can't comprehend. You can't imagine something you've never seen, like trying to explain color hues to someone who's colorblind and doesn't see red the same way we do, or what have you.

I think we take sight for granted. Even though I'm near-sighted, I don't really notice it until I put on glasses (which I don't have, btw) and I can actually see road signs and stuff. I always thought it was interesting to think about things we've never seen, like, what if other colors existed? What would they be like? What would another planet of life look like after going through millions of years of evolution and coincidences completely different from our own? It hurts ze brain, but is nevertheless interesting to think about, even if there's no conclusion to find.

[issendai.livejournal.com]

what if other colors existed?

They do! We miss a whole level of color and pattern in flowers because we can't see ultraviolet. I saw a couple of examples on a nature show, and it was striking--perfectly plain little flowers became gaudy. The ultraviolet patches appeared as darker spots on a black-and-white computer screen, a necessary workaround to make an invisible color visible, but can you imagine what the color might look like to an insect that can see ultraviolet?

[mincedniku.livejournal.com]

Yea, I'm familiar with ultraviolet light, but is it actually creating different colors? I know it makes patterns and stuff that insects can see (*pictures a helicopter landing zone on the flower*), but I wonder if it's just a variation or a glowing or if it is a completely different color. It's hard for our brains to imagine any other color since the color wheel is a gradient; how could other colors exist between blue and purple, say? I mean, you have violet and different variations of the the colors, but a completely different color, like red or green? So when I think of ultraviolet, I think of it more as a different kind of light creating a different kind of visual, rather than it creating different colors.

And I'm going to stop there before I start sounding like a moron because I could ramble on unintelligently about this forever. XD

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

This is probably a good moment at which to point out that not all human cultures perceive seven colors.

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

Are they more likely to have more or fewer? I know European medieval and renaissance sources tended to blur darker reds and non-royal purples.

As it happens, we don't have seven colours anyhow: even without going into the debate on black, grey, and white as colours, the rainbow lacks all the browns.

seeing more colors

[teripettit.livejournal.com]

Well, whether you call it a "different" color or being able to perceive finer distinctions within the range of a existing color is I suppose a matter of semantics.

Think of the difference between the way a color-blind person sees colors and the way you see colors, then extrapolate that difference outward.

From what I gather, people with one kind of color blindness perceive both green and red as shades of what the normally sighted would call tan, caramel, chestnut - shades of orangish brown, perhaps more vibrant and energetic than true browns, but hard to discriminate between. Yet we think of green and red so different that they are opposites. Are we just perceiving finer distinctions in the greenish-reddish color range, or are we seeing more different colors?

Here's another relevant experiment. Bring up Photoshop and open the Color Picker. In the HSB entry fields, set your color to 110 hue, 100 saturation, and 100 brightness - an intense neon green. Close the dialog. Open it again. You know how there's that little square that shows the old color at the bottom and the new color at the top? Watch it closely as you slide the Hue slider up and down within the green range. If you have typical color vision, you will not be able to see any difference between the old and new colors until the Hue goes over 135 or under 90. That's a span of 45 degrees on the Hue wheel, one whole eighth of the circle, where all the fully saturated hues are indistinguishable to most of us. Objectively those are quite different light emissions coming off the screen, but we can't tell. Suppose you could see the differences? Would you just be perceiving finer distinctions between shades of bright green, or more different colors?

The fact that we are biased towards saying "more different colors" in the first case and "more shades of bright green" in the second case probably has more to do with a difficulty in imagining that which we can't see than it has in any true qualitative difference between the two situations. Someone who could easily perceive color shifts as the Hue slider moved between 100 and 130 degrees might feel as odd about calling them all shades of the "same" color as we would to calling red just another shade of green.

Re: seeing more colors

[mincedniku.livejournal.com]

That's really interesting, actually, and something I hadn't thought of. Thanks for sharing. ^^

[(Anonymous)]

What the article says about albino vision sounds a lot like astigmatism.

I have -5 myopia and some astigmatism. Myopia definitely makes the world blurry: a sparrow won't look like a bird-shaped thing with gray here and brown there, it looks like a roughly round grey-brown dapple that blends at the edges with the coulours of its surroundings. It may have a touch of tan at one edge, which would mean it's a male. (Before I got my glasses, I once happened to watch a sparrow couple through binocular. I didn't recognise the bird and had to look it up in a book, because I had no idea that sparrows actually have *patterns* on them, I'd thought they were solid brown.)

The Wikipedia page on myopia has a pair of pictures to show what the blurring looks like:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Human_eyesight_two_children_and_ball_normal_vision_color.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Fileisnotcorruptedactuallyupload3453405.jpg
Without my glasses, my world turns into an impressionist painting, like watercolour on wet paper. There are no sharp edges, all colours blend into the neighbouring ones, and all corners become round. Black text on white paper looks gray. If I put my glasses on the floor, I can't see them, because the floor happily floods over the thin frame and swallows it. When I put my glasses on, sharp contours appear and divide colours each on their own side. Trees have leaves and needles, not just a mass of softly gliding green colour.

When I bought my first contacts, I decided to save some money and get non-toric ones, ie. contacts that don't correct astigmatism (but do correct myopia). The difference had seemed negligible at the optician. It still seemed negligible when I put the contacts on. But slowly I began to realise that my ability to see far was dramatically worse than before. I couldn't read road signs across the street. I couldn't see the number of an approaching bus. When I was playing cards, I couldn't read the symbols on other people's cards. Eveything looked just normal, I just couldn't see details at distance. They did not blur away as they do with myopia. They just... weren't there. Text wasn't gray, it was black-and-white but I couldn't tell what shape the black part was. As if indeed my world had been set on a lower resolution. It was terribly frustrating. Also, lighting had much more effect than before. It didn't seem darker than before, but I just couldn't see in bad lighting. Weak lamplight was like golden mist or smoke filling the room.

I now have toric contact lenses. I can part with some money if it makes the mist go away. (Though it's not even real mist... real mist is white. Astigmatism is invisible colourless mist.)

Astigmatism is one sneaky problem. My father has vision much like mine, and his optician once accidentally gave him glasses with inverted astigmatism correction, ie. they worsened rather than corrected. He didn't even notice it before he got a headache.

The article you linked to seems to lump together myopia, hyperopia and astigmatism in a way I suspect is incorrect. As I said myopia and astigmatism feel very different. I've never tried being hyperopic, obviously, but I used to have a friend who was. We once swapped glasses, just out of curiosity. She asked me what I did with glasses that shrink the world further, and I asked her what she did with glasses that blur the world further. :-D So apparently hyperopic vision shrinks the picture, and doesn't blur it.

Ooh, and to get back to myopia: glasses vision and contact lenses vision are different. I suppose contacts give me normal vision like most people have. Glasses, sort of... move the picture to a different place... because they correct it way before it hits the eye. (If that makes any sense to you.) When I change from contacts to glasses, I feel dizzy for a moment before I adjust to it. If you can borrow minus glasses from somebody, you can try this by holding them in front of your eyes and moving them closer and further. The picture gets bigger and smaller, and if you try walking around while looking through the glasses, you'll probably start feeling dizzy too.

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[(Anonymous)]

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