The new color “olo” is described as an intensely saturated peacock green. Credit: Marissa Gutierrez/UC Berkeley (Source: Trevor McKinnon via Unsplash)
HWNI member Austin Roorda is one of the creators of a new platform called “Oz” that allows scientists to control what a person sees — including a color never seen before by humans — by directly stimulating individual photoreceptor cells in the eye. Five study participants, including Roorda, saw this new color, which they call “olo” and describe as a blue-green of unprecedented saturation.
The study, published in Science Advances, was a collaboration between Roorda, professor of optometry and vision science; senior author Ren Ng, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley; their teams at UC Berkeley; and colleagues at the University of Washington. The team was able to induce perception of olo — as well as other colors and images — by mapping the retina and then stimulating up to 1,000 specific cone photoreceptor cells at one time using microdoses of laser light.
Human color vision is based on the activation of three types of cone cells in the retina that respond to overlapping wavelengths of light. By selectively activating only the M type of cone — a scenario that does not occur naturally because of this overlap — the scientists caused people to see a brand-new color.
This new technology could be used to answer fundamental questions about human vision and aid in the study of color blindness and vision loss. The research was funded in part by federal grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Read more from UC Berkeley News.