Our eyes allow us to perceive the many colors that make up our world; however, it looks like we may have missed one of them. A team of scientists claims to have found a color no one has ever seen before. Their descriptions of this elusive shade have elicited curiosity, wonder, and even some skepticism among their peers.
The researchers published their findings in the journal Science Advances. To understand how the color was found, it's important to remember how our eyes work. Inside our retinas, there are cone cells, which are responsible for perceiving color. There are three types of cones—long (L), medium (M), and short-wavelength (S). Each one is sensitive to different wavelengths, with L cones processing the color red, S seeing blue, and M cones somewhere the middle, closer to the color green.
Since M cones are in the middle of our visible spectrum, they tend to overlap with the other two. In other words, there’s no natural light that can only stimulate M cones without sparking at least a bit of the others. To see what that would look like, the researchers created a tool called Oz, after Frank L. Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. The device—made up of mirrors, lasers, and optical devices—can map a person’s retina and shine a laser to only stimulate the M cones, sending a color sign to the brain that doesn't exist in the natural world.
The resulting color, named olo, is described as an intense blue-green that can only be seen by isolating the M cones. “We predicted from the beginning that it would look like an unprecedented color signal but we didn’t know what the brain would do with it,” Ren Ng, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, told The Guardian. “It was jaw-dropping. It’s incredibly saturated.”
To explain just how intense the shade is, Ng offered the following example to the BBC: “Let's say you go around your whole life and you see only pink, baby pink, a pastel pink,” he said. “And then one day you go to the office and someone's wearing a shirt, and it's the most intense baby pink you've ever seen, and they say it's a new color and we call it red.”
Some experts say the research has limited value and that it's not a new color, but rather just more saturated green that can only be produced in someone with a regular chromatic mechanism. On the other hand, others believe it could also help people with red-green color blindness to experience typical vision or offer helpful information regarding eye conditions such as retinitis pigmentosa.
If you'd like to see olo for yourself, you're out of luck, as it can only be achieved by manipulating the retina. “This is basic science,” says Ng. “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.” Still, the team offered the closest color match available to olo, which you can see below.
Researchers claim to have found an “unprecedented” new color no one has ever seen before.
Now known as olo, it is described as an intense blue-green. It can only be seen with the help of a laser tool that only activates M cones.
Color #00ffcc, the shade closest to Olo that can be seen on a digital screen
Sources: Novel color via stimulation of individual photoreceptors at population scale; Hue new? Scientists claim to have found colour no one has seen before; Scientists claim to have discovered ‘new colour' no one has seen before
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