A never-before-seen colour has now been found, claim scientists

After travelling to various parts inside and outside the planet and sighting most forms of life in various environments, humans might believe they have seen everything there is to see, but according to a group of scientists, the reality is not so.

In an experiment in which researchers in the US had laser pulses fired into their eyes, their individual cells in the retina were stimulated to push perception beyond its natural limits. According to the team of five, they saw a colour they call blue-green but added that it does not fully capture the richness of the experience.

“We predicted from the beginning that it would look like an unprecedented colour signal but we didn’t know what the brain would do with it. It was jaw-dropping. It’s incredibly saturated” said Ren Ng, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley.

While the researchers stressed that the hue which they named ' Olo ' could only be experienced through laser manipulation of the retina, they shared an image of a turquoise square which gave a sense of the colour. “There is no way to convey that colour in an article or on a monitor,” said Austin Roorda, a vision scientist on the team. “The whole point is that this is not the colour we see, it’s just not. The colour we see is a version of it, but it absolutely pales by comparison with the experience of olo.”

The experiment to find new colours
Humans perceive colours when light falls on the colour-sensitive cells called cones in the retina. There are three types of cones that are sensitive to long (L), medium (M) and short (S) wavelengths of light.
When natural light enters the eyes, it stimulates the S, M, and L cones, creating different colours. While the blue light stimulates the S cones and the red light stimulates the L cones, the M cones sit in a middle zone, and there is no natural light that stimulates them.

Thus, the Berkeley team set out to understand and overcome this limitation by mapping a part of the person's retina to find out the positions of the M cones. A laser was used to scan the retina, where it fired a tiny pulse of light to stimulate the cells.

The new colourThe results of the experiment were published in Science Advances, mentioning a patch of colour in the field of vision about twice the size of a full moon. The colour can not be seen through natural light as the M cones were stimulated exclusively.
The name 'Olo' has been derived from the binary 010, signifying that out of the S, M, L cones, only the M cones were active.

Can we see Olo?
“This is basic science,” said Ng. “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.”