Politics
What Is ‘Olo’, A New Colour The Naked Eye Can’t See?
I’m jealous of animals that can see a broader spectrum of colours than us – we’ve been bested by fish, birds, and bees in that department.
Still, a small win for people’s peepers: scientists say they’ve discovered a colour called “olo”, which is only visible to people who’ve been exposed to a laser process called Oz.
Described as a blue-green shade more saturated than the naked eye can perceive, “olo” has “wowed” those who say they saw it.
How can people see “olo”?
The Oz method involves mirrors, optical effects, and lasers.
“We chose Oz to be the name because it was like we were going on a journey to the land of Oz to see this brilliant colour that we’d never seen before,” said James Carl Fong, a doctoral student in electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley.
Oz targets the cones (or cells in the eye which give us our colour vision) in people’s retinas – the part of the eye that converts light into images for the brain.
The Oz lasers can be trained to shoot light into a tiny part of people’s retinas, activating specific cones. Despite the minuscule target area, the resulting picture looks full and large to recipients.
When a type of cone cell called ‘M cones’ are primarily targeted, some people see the olo colour, the paper said.
“I joined [the Oz project] after meeting this other student who was working with Ren, who told me that they were shooting lasers into people’s eyes to make them see impossible colours,” Fong told UC Berkeley News.
What does “olo” look like?
According to the paper, it’s a “blue-green of unprecedented saturation”.
Professor Austin Roorda, who was part of Project Oz, told UC Berkeley News “it was like a profoundly saturated teal … the most saturated natural colour was just pale by comparison”.
“When I pinned olo up against other monochromatic light, I really had that ‘wow’ experience.”
Speaking to BBC Radio 4′s Today, Professor Ng, who was a participant in the study, said it was more saturated than “any colour that you can see in the real world”.
The research team is now exploring whether Oz could help people with colour blindness.