By Natania Arora
Scientists in the US believe that they have discovered a new colour, which they have named ‘olo’. Only five people have seen the colour, three of which were co-authors of the research paper. The colour has been described to be a ‘saturated shade of blue-green’ as stated in The Independent, and is said to be a colour that no human has ever seen before.
Olo was discovered through an experiment by researchers in the US where laser pulses were fired into their eyes. They had developed the ‘Oz Vision System technique’. The name was inspired by the ‘Wizard of Oz’ and green-tinted glasses worn by people in the Emerald City. This device was originally designed by a team of scientists from UC Berkeley and the University of Washington, and was adjusted to be used in this study. It works by stimulating cone cells in the retina, which are responsible for detecting colour. The retina contains three types of cone cells – L (long), M (medium) and S (short), and they are each sensitive to different wavelengths of light. The device was able to isolate and only stimulate the M cone cells in the retina and not the surrounding L and S cone cells, which are usually also stimulated in normal vision when the M cone cells are stimulated.
The colour can only be seen when the retina is stimulated by a laser. It was given the name ‘olo’ because it represents the binary 010, which is used to show that only the M cones are being stimulated out of the L, M and S cones.
Professor Ren Ng at the University of California was a co-author of the study and believes that the results could possibly advance research into colour blindness or other conditions that affect vision, which could impact people across the world.