
'Olo' is a brand-new color only ever seen by 5 people
Using an experimental technique called "Oz," researchers stimulated the human retina such that people saw a brand-new color.
Scientists have devised a method to hijack the human eye, enabling it to see brand-new colors that lie beyond the scope of natural human vision.
With this technique, the researchers enabled five people to see a new color, dubbed "olo," which the study participants described as a "blue-green of unprecedented saturation." The researchers, some of whom participated in the experiment themselves, described their technique and the new color in a study published Friday (April 18) in the journal Science Advances.
"The ultimate goal is to provide programmable control over every photoreceptor [light-sensing cell] in the retina," primarily for research purposes, said co-first author James Fong, a doctoral student in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. "Although this has not been achieved to that level, the method we present in the current study demonstrates that a lot of the key principles are possible in practice," Fong told Live Science in an email.