Vision scientist Austin Roorda says Olo is "not a colour we see".
Vision scientist Austin Roorda says Olo is "not a colour we see".
Scientists at the University of California claim to have discovered a new colour named Olo.
Olo can only be experienced through laser manipulation, stimulating the M cone in the retina.
Some scientists dispute the finding, arguing it’s a more saturated green with limited practical value.
Scientists claim they have discovered a new colour.
A team at the University of California, in Berkeley, had laser pulses fired into their eyes, enabling them to experience a colour no one had seen before.
The five people who have seen the colour described it as “blue-green”, but said that did not capture the full richness of the experience.
Researchers shared an image of a turquoise square they said best matched the new colour, which they named Olo, but added that the colour could only be experienced through laser manipulation.
Ren Ng, an electrical engineer at the university, described the colour as “jaw-dropping” and “incredibly saturated”.
He told the Guardian: “We predicted from the beginning that it would look like an unprecedented colour signal, but we didn’t know what the brain would do with it.”
But some scientists have disputed the find. “It is not a new colour,” John Barbur, a vision scientist at City University, told the newspaper, adding that the scientists’ work had “limited value”.
“It’s a more saturated green that can only be produced in a subject with normal red-green chromatic mechanism when the only input comes from M cones,” Barbur said.
Other researchers argued that the colour was all about the “experience” and that there was no way to explain it in terms of something we already see.
“There is no way to convey that colour in an article or on a monitor,” said Austin Roorda, a vision scientist on the team at the University of California. “The whole point is that this is not the colour we see – it’s just not. The colour we see is a version of it, but it absolutely pales by comparison with the experience of Olo.”
Looking at the new colour, Olo, "pales by comparison with the experience of it".
Ng described the colour as “basic science”, adding: “We’re not going to see Olo on any smartphone displays or any TVs any time soon. And this is very, very far beyond VR headset technology.”
Natural light is a blend of multiple wavelengths, which stimulate different areas of the retina to varying extents, but there is one part of the retina, known as the M cone, which is never excited by natural light.
The new colour stimulates the M cone by firing a tiny pulse of light to stimulate the cell, a state which natural light cannot achieve. The result is a patch of colour in the field of vision that is about twice the size of the Moon.
The name Olo comes from the binary 010, in which the M cone represents the one, and is the only cone switched on.
The laser, named Oz vision after the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, could help researchers understand science questions about how the brain creates visual perceptions of the world. Researchers also believe they might learn more about colour blindness or diseases that affect vision through the new device.
