Dalton’s Jungle: a video game for assessing color anomalies in children’s vision

James A. Ferwerda and Ang Pet Chean

Anomalies of color vision affect approximately ten percent of the male population and a smaller percentage of females. With recent advances in desktop publishing and printing technologies, color is now commonly used in teaching materials in K-12 classrooms. Therefore it is becoming increasingly important to identify children with color-anomalous vision so appropriate accommodations can be made. Existing tests such as the Ishihara plates and the Farnsworth D-15 test are both expensive to acquire and difficult to administer to the pediatric population. To address these issues we have developed a PC-based video game called Dalton’s Jungle that can assess color-anomalies in children’s vision. The goal of the game is to find animal patterns that are hidden in images of jungle-like foliage. The colors of both the animals and the foliage are chosen to fall along dichromatic confusion lines in the CIE u,v uniform chromaticity space. In each round of the game, chromaticity differences between the animal and foliage patterns increase over time, allowing direct measurement of discrimination thresholds. Thus the game can assess both the form and degree of color anomalies in vision. Performance is summarized in both tabular and graphical reports and is referenced to age-based norms.

This work was supported by NSF grant IIS-0113310 and the Cornell Program of Computer Graphics.