Researchers Discover New Color - "olo" Never Experienced Before

Billions of colors - that's how many shades the human eye can perceive, and just as many can be displayed on a computer screen. But one color that the human eye hasn't been able to see, until now, is the newly discovered color "olo," whose closest visible color is turquoise, or blue-green. The trick is to expand the eye's color space.

It might sound like an April Fool's joke, but the fact is that researchers have used a technique they call "oz" to create the color on the retina through so-called laser stimulation. In the scientific article "Superprecise lasers show people a whole new color" published in Science Advances, the discovery is explained:

"We introduce a principle concept, Oz, for displaying color images: direct control of human eye photoreceptor activity through light delivery to individual cells. Theoretically, new colors are possible by bypassing the limitations set by cone cells' spectral sensitivity and by exclusively activating M-cone cells. In practice, we confirm a partial expansion of the color space towards this theoretical ideal. Attempts to exclusively activate M-cones prove to evoke a color beyond the natural human spectrum, formally measured through color comparisons by human test subjects. They describe the color as blue-green with an unprecedented saturation."

In total, five people have seen or experienced the color olo, and describe it as intensely blue-green, although that is not enough to explain the experience according to them. The researchers initially predicted that it would be perceived as a new color signal, and explained that they did not know "what the brain would do with it," according to Ren Ng, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley.

Usually, different wavelengths are mixed into different colors, through stimulation of L-cones stimulated by red light (L as in long wavelengths), S-cones by blue light (short wavelengths), and M-cones which are in between. 

In natural light, however, there is no wavelength that stimulates only M-cones, and that is what the researchers wanted to circumvent. By examining a person's retina, they were able to find M-cones and stimulate this and several others with a light pulse. The color field experienced by only M-cones became about twice the size of a full moon according to the report, which points out that this is not possible to achieve through natural light. 

The result constitutes proof of principle for programmable control of individual photoreceptors on a large scale, which can contribute to research on how both eyes and brain function. Further experiments also showed that the test subjects perceived oz-colors in both still images and video form. 

The name "olo" comes from the binary numbers 1 and 0, where 010 represents the L, M, and S cones, and it is the M cones that are used for the color. But despite this, it is still a long way off before the color can be displayed digitally, according to Ren Ng:

“We will not see olo on any smartphone screens or televisions in the foreseeable future. And this is much, much further away than today's VR technology.”

For those who want to create the color closest to olo according to researchers, the hexadecimal (and visible to us) recipe is #70FBD1.

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