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By very precisely shooting lasers directly into the eye (do no try this at home), researchers claim it’s possible to experience a color never previously experienced. The five people who have seen the color, which the team calls “olo,” say that it’s a blue-green hue, but more saturated than any blue-green ever seen before.
As reported by The Guardian, a team at the University of California, Berkeley have published a new paper outlining a method for using a laser to stimulate individual cells in the retina in order to create stimulus that natural light couldn’t otherwise produce.
The color-sensitive eye cells, known as cones, are sensitive to long, medium, and short wavelengths of light. The laser in the UC Berkeley experiment stimulates just the medium cones, which are otherwise never stimulated in isolation.
The result of the targeted laser stimulation is a patch of color in the recipient’s vision that’s technically outside the natural range of your eye. “It was jaw-dropping. It’s incredibly saturated,” said UC Berkeley electrical engineer Ren Ng.
A vision expert consulted by the Guardian said that olo “is not a new color” and was instead simply a “more saturated green.”
For their part, the researchers are very open about this being a tiny stepping stone toward stimulating individual parts of the eye to create vision, but they hope that their new vision tool, named Oz, will enable research into scientific questions about how the brain processes vision to continue.
“This is basic science,” study engineer Ng told The Guardian. “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.”
Which goes ahead and preempts what I figured the logical next step was: Direct laser insertion into your eyeballs to program impossibly high-resolution landscapes right into your mind as you play videogames. Shame, I was hoping we’d jump right into some anime full-dive VR stuff from here.
Jokes about shooting lasers in your eyes aside, to be clear, the study was approved as humane by the review boards at both UC Berkeley and the University of Washington, and the study scientists “obtained informed consent from all participants.”
For my part I think we should not tempt whatever cosmic horrors exist in the realm of unseen, unseeable colors and leave well enough alone. What if by seeing it once you’re now vulnerable to their existence? There are plenty of colors already. How many more colors could we really need? Just one man’s opinion.
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Kurt Indovina
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