Arctic Colour Project

We are investigating how the environment you live in affects your colour perception, and to be able to do that we are measuring the “visual diet” of volunteers as well as asking people to take part in computer based studies in the lab

To measure what people actually see in day to day life, we are using a small body-mounted sensor manufactured by nanoLambda. The data from the nanoLamda gives us information about the colour, intensity and type of lighting people are exposed to during their everyday life.

Here’s an example of the data we captured from wearing the sensor outdoors around sunset in the UK earlier this year. At the start of the video, you can see there’s lots of light in the blue part of the colour spectrum. As the sun sets the amount of light overall decreases and the relative amount of long-wavelength light (orange/red) increases. We hope to find out how seasonal and geographical differences in light exposure are related to differences in colour perception.