One afternoon in 2005, Don McPherson was playing ultimate Frisbee in Santa Cruz. He was wearing a pair of sunglasses, when his friend, Michael Angell, admiring his eyewear, asked to borrow them. When he put the glasses on, he was stunned by what he saw.

McPherson recalls Angell saying, with surprise, “I can see the cones,” referring to a set of orange traffic cones nearby. What made this a startling observation was that Angell had been colorblind his whole life. The sunglasses, which McPherson, a materials scientist, had engineered, actually allowed him to see the orange hue for the first time,  and distinguish that color from the surrounding grass and concrete.

Based in Berkeley, California, McPherson, who has a PhD in glass science from Alfred University, originally specialized in creating eyewear forimage: http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/a4/bd/a4bd301f-9b42-45f1-90bd-474f7206cd4b/unknown.jpeg__800x450_q85_crop_upscale.jpg

While it was a fortuitous discovery, McPherson emphasizes that the eventual manufacturing and execution of the product is based on years of rigorous science. The creators are constantly experimenting with new iterations. “My bike bag has about ten pairs of glasses in it, different versions,” he says.

To further bolster the effect of the glasses, Schmeder, a mathematician, created a sophisticated model of color vision in the human eye that incorporates 10,000 natural and man-made colors. Informed by this, he designed a filter for the eyewear that optimizes the way a user views this wide spectrum of hues.

The glasses are built on fundamental vision science. McPherson explains that all people have three photopigments in the eye, also known as ….