Latest / Bloomberg Intelligence / EnChroma's Schmeder on Bringing Color to the Colorblind (Audio)

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EnChroma's Schmeder on Bringing Color to the Colorblind (Audio) · Bloomberg Intelligence

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  Speaker 1: That's a Bloomberg business flash June listening to Taking Stock
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  Speaker 1: with Bim Box and Kathleen Hays on Bloomberg Radio. Look
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  Speaker 1: around you. If there are twelve men nearby, one of
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  Speaker 1: them will have some form of color blindness, some kind
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  Speaker 1: of color vision deficiency. One in twelve men have color deficiencies,
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  Speaker 1: as well as one and two hundred women. This is
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  Speaker 1: through out the world have color vision deficiency. I can't
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  Speaker 1: see colors accurately. But there is a solution. Andy Schmider
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  Speaker 1: is the co founder and the president and the chief
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  Speaker 1: executive and Chroma, and he joins us now from Berkeley, California. Andy,
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  Speaker 1: tell us a little bit about your solution to this
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  Speaker 1: condition of color vision deficiency. I mean, UM. This company
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  Speaker 1: actually got started out of research by myself and Don McPherson,
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  Speaker 1: which goes back over ten years. Originally, Uh, Don, he
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  Speaker 1: has a PhD in glass science. UM. He was experimenting
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  Speaker 1: with some experimental lenses for an application in laser surgery
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  Speaker 1: and discovered a kind of unusual color transformation effect that
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  Speaker 1: seemed to help people with someone with color blindness. Uh.
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  Speaker 1: And then you know, we teamed up and over the
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  Speaker 1: years have kind of perfected the delivery of this UM
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  Speaker 1: technology into a consumer friendly plastic lens format UM. And
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  Speaker 1: as you've seen, we've had some pretty amazing response uh
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  Speaker 1: from our customers in these online videos and and so on.
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  Speaker 1: So andy, Uh, the most common form of color blindness, Yes, red,
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  Speaker 1: green color blindness. What what is it? Then? So you've
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  Speaker 1: developed the technology, How does how do these glasses work?
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  Speaker 1: How do they balance the signals properly so my eye
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  Speaker 1: can see colors all of a sudden. Yeah. So on
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  Speaker 1: the retina, which is the light receiving part of the eye,
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  Speaker 1: the back of the eye, there's an array of about
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  Speaker 1: six million tiny little light receptors. They're called the cone cells,
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  Speaker 1: and it's kind of like the the sensor inside of
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  Speaker 1: a digital camera. UM. These cells can be classified into
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  Speaker 1: three different types UM, and the three types respond to
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  Speaker 1: different regions of the visible spectrum, and that this gives
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  Speaker 1: rise to the the way we describe color in terms
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  Speaker 1: of its composition of three different primaries. Now, in the
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  Speaker 1: eye of a person with red green color blindness, the
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  Speaker 1: cells that are responsible for receiving red versus green light,
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  Speaker 1: so those are the two different primary colors. They are
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  Speaker 1: spectrally shifted so that their responses have become overlapping. So
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  Speaker 1: one way to imagine this is like suppose, UM, you're
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  Speaker 1: kind of like tuning the knob on a an old
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  Speaker 1: analog radio and you're trying to listen to one station,
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  Speaker 1: but you hear the the talk of an adjacent station
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  Speaker 1: is bleeding over right. That's kind of like what their
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  Speaker 1: eyes are doing, but optic lee. So essentially they're looking
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  Speaker 1: at something that's either red or green, but instead of
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  Speaker 1: simply seeing red or green, they're kind of getting this
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  Speaker 1: cross talk between the two. So the solution to this
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  Speaker 1: UM is what is delivered in our lens, which is
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  Speaker 1: a type of UM optical filter called the narrow band
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  Speaker 1: notch filter, and it blocks out specific frequencies of light
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  Speaker 1: where this overlap is occurring, and that enables more like
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  Speaker 1: um cleanly separated image to be transmitted to the eye,
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  Speaker 1: and that's what helps them overcome the symptoms of red
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  Speaker 1: green color blindness. Andy, they're about and estimated the three
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  Speaker 1: hundred million people around the world who suffer from some
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  Speaker 1: form of red green color vision deficiency. You say that
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  Speaker 1: this is not a cure, but tell us how large
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  Speaker 1: the companies and what your plans are. UM, Yeah, that's right.
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  Speaker 1: So the role of wide market is potentially huge. UM.
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  Speaker 1: You know, we've we've been able to sell tens of
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  Speaker 1: thousands through our um e commerce website channel, and you know,
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  Speaker 1: reaching the larger global market is going to be an
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  Speaker 1: interesting challenge for us. We're kind of at the point
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  Speaker 1: now where we're gonna be transitioning from you know, having
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  Speaker 1: proven an established that we have a working product that's
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  Speaker 1: helping people to now like expanding and growing our operation,
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  Speaker 1: especially to be able to reach some of the overseas markets. Well.
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  Speaker 1: And Eddy, what is the challenge in marketing this? It
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  Speaker 1: seems like a great product that people would just like
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  Speaker 1: go online say, man, everybody's got to have this but
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  Speaker 1: it's not that simple. What's the biggest challenge you face now? Yeah, well,
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  Speaker 1: you know one one challenge is that everybody wants to
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  Speaker 1: try it um. There's kind of a they want to
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  Speaker 1: They want to see that it's real before they invest
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  Speaker 1: in the the item. So um and that's really kind
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  Speaker 1: of impossible to deliver just to say through the e
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  Speaker 1: commerce channel. So UM. You know, you can go into
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  Speaker 1: what we call the eye care professional UM market or
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  Speaker 1: the three O s Optometrists, opticians, optomologists, uh and and
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  Speaker 1: we are currently available in about dirty locations in the US. UM.
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  Speaker 1: So that's one way you can you can you can
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  Speaker 1: try it um well and just medi rewas to the
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  Speaker 1: best of luck. He's CEO and co founder of and Chroma,
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  Speaker 1: new eyeglasses that help color blind people see color. I'm
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