The inspiration came from an ultimate-Frisbee game. Don McPherson, who has a Ph.D. in glass science, lent a pair of laser-operator safety goggles to a friend who had forgotten his sunglasses. The friend, who happened to be color-blind, found that the lenses made the landscape uncannily vivid.
It turns out that these lenses block a narrow part of the visual spectrum, which allows people with color-deficient vision to separate, for example, reds and greens, which will generally look blurred into a brown. "The narrow-band lens-filter design takes out only those specific shades most responsible for color confusion," McPherson says.
The UV450, a sunglass variant of the original design, applies the same idea. While regular sunglasses dull the transmission of all light reaching your eyeball, the EnChroma's coating isolates wavelengths of colors that end up looking mixed together to our naked eye. What remains is specific sections of the visual spectrum that relay true colors to your peepers.
As your optometrist has probably reminded you, staring at a computer screen all day is bad for your eyes. The short-wavelength blue light coming from a fully engaged monitor causes eye strain. It can even trick your body into staying awake if you read email in bed. But, until someone creates e-ink computer screens, we will have to deal with it.
Gunnar's solution is a lens that protects your eyes from the harm of looking at monitors and florescent lights by ramping up your vision's color contrast. The yellow tint in its line of computer eyewear shifts the visible spectrum so that you see a warmer tone, which relieves your eyes from the strain of processing unnatural light. In addition to possessing an antireflective coating that cuts out the glare, the lenses have been curved to a specific degree that prevents air currents from drying out your exposed eyeballs.