As per the research, the colour is said to be the saturated shade of blue-green. It cannot be seen by the naked eye without stimulating specific cells in the retina.
In a groundbreaking research, the scientists claim to have discovered a new colour that humans have never seen before. The findings of a research, published in the journal Science Advances on Friday, claim a new colour ‘Olo’ can be seen by stimulating specific cells in the retina. The study’s co-author, Professor Ren Ng from the University of California, has described the findings as “remarkable”.
Method adopted by the Scientists to discover the colour
As per the research paper, the method follows an experiment in which researchers in the US had laser pulses fired into their eyes. The participants claim to have witnessed a blue-green colour.
An excerpt from the research paper explained the methodology reads, “We introduce a principle, Oz, for displaying colour imagery: directly controlling the human eye’s photoreceptor activity via cell-by-cell light delivery. Theoretically, novel colours are possible through bypassing the constraints set by the cone spectral sensitivities and activating M cone cells exclusively.”
New colour ‘Olo’
In the findings, the researchers shared an image of a blue-green square to give a sense of the colour, which they named ‘Olo’. They also stressed that the hue could only be experienced through laser manipulation of the retina.
There were five participants in the study – four male and one female – who all had normal colour vision. Of them, three were co-authors of the research paper. They introduced a new principle for displaying color, Oz.
As proof of principle, they performed human subject experiments on a prototype Oz system that stimulates thousands of retinal cone cells. This new principle enables the display of colours that lie beyond the well-known, bounded colour gamut of natural human vision.
To explain this further, the research paper stated, “In normal color vision, any light that stimulates an M cone cell must also stimulate its neighboring L and/or S cones, because the M cone spectral response function lies between that of the L and S cones and overlaps completely with them (2, 3). However, Oz stimulation can by definition target light to only M cones and not L or S, which in principle would send a color signal to the brain that never occurs in natural vision. Theoretically, Oz expands the natural human color gamut to any (L, M, and S) color coordinate.”
