August 11, 2026
An article published on July 27, 2026 in The New Yorker highlights research done at UC Berkeley by former HWNI member Austin Roorda, who is now a professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada but retains an affiliation with UC Berkeley, along with Ren Ng, associate professor of electrical engineering & computer sciences, and other colleagues. The platform they developed, called “Oz”, allows people to see a color never seen before by humans by stimulating specific cone photoreceptors in the retina with laser light. The color appeared as an intensely saturated blue-green that they named “olo”.
Read the article in The New Yorker: “What would it mean to see a new color?”
