Achromator: Translating Color to Monochrome

Achromator is designed to explore a simple yet profound idea: how can the vibrant world of color be meaningfully represented in monochrome? By translating color into grayscale through dynamic transparent textures, Achromator offers a unique way to interpret and interact with visual information. The approach may resonate with those curious about exploring how color and structure of color can be expressed in other forms. It captures key features like lightness, vibrancy, mixing of colors and complementary colors, creating a monochrome view that retains much of the richness of the original setting.

What Does Achromator Do?

The iOS app reads the video feed from a phone camera and turns it into a black-and-white view. The monochrome result is not arbitrary — its dynamic textures represent the original colors. You see a grayscale version of the scene, but with additional texture that carries almost all color information present in the original.

Achromator is designed to translate color in such a way that key features and structure are captured in monochrome. Here is the result:

• Average Local Lightness: The translation preserves the average lightness of each area of the image (with respect to a standard observer). In other words, for people with normal color vision, the lightness of a sufficienlty large part of the scene will be similar to the original, just in grayscale.
• Local Contrast and Chroma: The notion of chroma refers to how intense, rich or vibrant a color is. High chroma, like for a saturated red or a pure yellow, is translated into high local contrast in the monochrome feed. In the grayscale video, areas with higher contrast correspond to more vivid, saturated colors in the original.
• Achromatic Colors: An achromatic color is a color like white, gray and black which does not have any chroma. These are often not even considered proper colors. Achromator translates these colors without change, so there will be no additional texture on any area which is achromatic in the original.
• Complementary Colors result in Complementary Textures: Colors which cancel each other out when added (typically those are drawn on opposite sides of the color wheel) like red and green, or blue and orange, are called complementary. In this sense, there are complementary textures in the grayscale feed. One could add the monochrome texturing and they would cancel each other out. This creates a visual relationship that mirrors how complementary colors behave in the world of color theory, but now in the form of textures.
• Smooth Blending: Just like colors can smoothly transition, the app creates textures which can blend smoothly too. When the original colors change across a gradient, the textures smoothly move from one pattern to another.

Who is this for?

If you are visually impaired in a way that your visual system does not have the ability to distinguish color, this might be helpful in understanding color and its structure. It might also help in day-to-day activities like determining if a banana is ripe - but there may be easier or faster ways of doing this. So far this app has been written without direct input from colorblind people, so your feedback would be more than welcome!

If you are a philosopher interested in perception and find color to be a puzzling concept, this may nudge you to look a little deeper into structuralist ideas?

If you are a psychologist interested in sensory substitution, I am sure there are some interesting experiments to design. A successful pairing of this with the McCullough illusion would be awesome, so please let me know if anyone attempts that!

Examples

(under construction)

How Can We Help You?

If you have any questions, feedback or need assistance with the app, send an email to support@xpolar.org