Physics Would it be possible to make black and white glasses filters?

[Blobbenstein]

I have wondered this for a while...the idea of having glasses that convert different frequencies of light into shades of grey, and black and white.
Would that be possible?

I think it might be quite nice to walk around pretending to be in a B&W movie.

 

[KLS52]

I don't know if it would be possible. I don't know enough about that kind of stuff. Sounds cool, though.

 

[SummerRain]

I don't know - but my initial thoughts are that I don't think so. Filters work by absorbing some colours/frequencies of light and transmitting others. But black is an absence of light, white light is all the colours of light together and grey light is all colours of lights in equal amounts.

A grey colour filter would reduce the amount of light transmitted by each colour equally - so red things would look a bit less red, blue things a bit less blue, etc. If you used multiple colour filters, I think you just wouldn't get any light transmitted. I don't think you could "turn" red light into grey with a lens.

Could be wrong though.

 

[Blobbenstein]

I suppose red(or any colour) light would have to be turned into equal amounts of red, green and blue......?

I suppose that might be difficult..

Simplest way to do it would be to have some sort of TV screen for each eye...not sure that would work.

 

[SummerRain]

Yeah, and I don't think a lens could do that. If you didn't stick to lenses though, if you had some sort of camera that system that took an image of where you were looking, B&W it and then projected it onto your glasses... that would work. I don't know if it would be compact enough to realistically wear definitely well outside of my expertise now. But probably, cameras in phones are pretty small.

 

[Pirate]

I was gonna say you could use a camera. other than that I doubt its possible

 

[yakherder]

Google Glasses will probably have that app soon enough.

 

[Blobbenstein]

if you went the VR glasses way, a powerful computer could turn every car into a 1920s car, and put everyone in 1920s cloths, and put in those film blemishes.

I think there could be all sorts of aps that turn the environment into something else.