An example of practical implications of colour vision and its anomalies
We often use colour as a method of visualising quantities. Here, we are going to watch a video of a presentation where a developer of scientific visualisation software talks about the processes of creating a new 'colour map'—a new way of converting quantities into colours. This requires considering how human colour vision works and being aware of the effects of photoreceptor anomalies.
This video gives a great perspective of colour vision and of the value of understanding the workings of human vision. Note though that the video goes into some additional concepts that we won't considering here. Don't worry about those new concepts—just try to identify the concepts we have been considering (perhaps being presented in a different way), and think about how they relate to the visualisation goals. In particular, we won't be covering the XYZ space material and we only looked at one model of perceptual colour dimensions (the L*a*b model).
As described in the video, they did a small amount of user testing when deciding on the 'default' colourmap. Which one do we prefer?
Finally, we will finish on a very important topic—how pixels relate to surfaces.