Scientists have discovered a new color «olo» — it appears when you shine a laser in the eye

Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have stated that stimulating the human eye with a laser makes it possible to see a new color called «olo», which cannot be seen in any other way.

However, vision experts deny the statement of the American scientists, emphasizing that «olo» is not a new color, but simply a more saturated green. Meanwhile, the researchers note that they have so far made only a tiny step in what is called stimulating certain parts of the eye to see brighter colors and shades. They hope that a new tool they have developed to study the peculiarities of human vision called Oz will help answer the question of how the brain processes visual information.

The five people who have seen the color, which the team calls «olo», say it’s a blue-green hue, but more saturated than any blue-green have never seen before. The color-sensitive cells of the eye, the cones, perceive long, medium, and short wavelengths of light. The laser in the University of California, Berkeley experiment stimulates only the middle cones, which are otherwise never stimulated in isolation.

The result of targeted laser stimulation is color spot in the recipient’s field of vision, which cannot be obtained under any natural light. Scientists do not exclude that the next step will be to stimulate human eyes with a laser to reproduce brighter colors and Programming incredibly high-resolution landscapes right in your mind in VR games and applications The study was approved as humane by the Institutional Review Boards of the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Washington, and the researchers who conducted the study «obtained informed consent from all participants».

The results of the study were published in the journal Science Advances

Source: PCGamer; The Guardian