131: How new color 'olo' stretches the limits of human perception

Last month, UC Berkeley researchers published a study about how they tricked the eye into seeing a new color. It was a highly saturated teal, a peacock green, the greenest of all greens. 

The scientists produced this color, which they named “olo,” by shining a laser into the eye and stimulating one type of color-sensitive photoreceptor cells called cones. 

Austin Roorda, a professor of optometry and vision science at Berkeley’s School of Optometry, developed the optical imaging platform they used in this project. It’s called Oz, after the story The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In the 1939 film adaptation, the lead character, Dorothy, goes from her black-and-white farm in Kansas to the color world of Oz.

“Ozvision is really directly tied to the book and to the movie where the Emerald City is this unearthly green color,” said Roorda. “The intent and the aspiration was to elicit that same kind of response by going from a natural-colored world to a supernatural-colored world by a direct stimulation of these cones.” 

It has enormous potential, he said, to transform how we understand and treat eye diseases, and to expand the way we see the world around us.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo via Unsplash+

This is the last episode of our Berkeley Voices series on transformation. In eight episodes, we have looked at how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. We'll be back with a new series in the fall.

See all episodes of the series.

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