Eyeteq, a revolutionary TV adaptation for colour blind people that spawned the Eye2TV device featured on bespoken recently, and since then we caught up with its managing director Christopher Cytera to find out the story behind it and how it is progressing.

The adaptation is a product of Spectral Edge – a spin-off company from the University of East Anglia based in Cambridge, and put simply the company work with image processing to improve quality for end users.

He said: “What we have is technology to process images and we can do quite a few things with that; we can combine images from infra-red and the visible spectrum to make a new image – that’s useful in things like security; we can combine multiple images from different focal points to give you much more depth in an image or video; or we can rearrange the colours in an image to make it more visible for colour blind people.

“All of that is based on the same technology, and the variant for colour blind people we call that Eyeteq; what that does is moves some of the luminant information to parts of the spectrum where colour blind people are more sensitive, so they can see the difference between red and green better – we have a free app that can demonstrate it called Eyeteq.”

Essentially the aim of the company is to get Eyeteq into commercial products, and as they are primarily a software based company the most ideal way for their technology to infiltrate the market is by way of licensing.

“We are in discussions with a few players in the TV industry about that; that’ll take some time but they are interested and one of the big applications is sport where you have teams that play all in green and all in red and colour blind fans can’t tell the difference – that was one of the inspirations behind Eyeteq and Eye2TV – also in cooking programs with red and green peppers and tomatoes in salads, steaks that are well done or rare; nature programs where you’ve got a lot of outdoor colours and autumnal colours that colour blind people can’t see.

“What we’re doing at the moment is running some trials with an independent research company on a variety of content; a group of about 100 colour blind volunteers who are going to view this content with and without Eyeteq applied to it so we can get some statistics with what they prefer, so those results should come out in a couple of months.”

In the intervening period it was decided they should design their own device using their Eyeteq technology – which is where Eye2TV came to the fore – rather than wait for a TV manufacturer to adopt it.

He said: “It was an interesting idea and it was well received in the community at first, we had good feedback on our Facebook page and from focus groups, it was tested on Kickstarter but with insufficient end-users willing to invest, the focus is now back to Spectral Edge’s usual B2B licensing model.”

Potentially a sports brand might be interested in funding it; a TV manufacturer may be interested pre-full integration; or better still a prominent football club, given the product’s early inspiration.

The obvious conclusion is that the ideal route to pursue is integration within televisions, he said: “We would license them the software, do some integration work to get it into their TV and have it there as a menu option on the control. It’ll take some time to do that, we thought having our own gadget would short circuit that process, [but] it won’t.”

Another route for Eyeteq to pursue eventually are smartphones – something almost everyone cannot do without, he added: “The integration challenge to get it into a smartphone is even harder than for a TV because you’ve got a processor which is quite difficult to access, [It’s] doing a lot of work already and the chip in the mobile phone is a market that’s dominated by two companies really and [they] have lots of companies like us knocking on their door! Once we get it on TVs and set-top boxes, the smartphone market becomes more feasible.”

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