Scientists find new colour that has never been seen before, call it 'olo'

There’s a new colour on the palette and no one knows about it yet. Scientists have claimed to have found a new hue that no one has seen before.

A couple of researchers manipulated their eye cells by having laser pulses fired into their eyes which simulated the retina beyond its natural capacity and produced a colour unknown to the humandkind.

While they cannot really describe the properties of the shade they saw, five people have said that it was sort of " blue-green", but they added that this description does not capture the full essence of their experience.

Ren Ng, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, said, “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.”

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The researchers released an image of a turquoise square to provide a rough visual reference for the colour they’ve named “olo,” but emphasised that the true hue can only be perceived through precise laser stimulation of the retina.

“There is no way to convey that colour in an article or on a monitor. 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,” Austin Roorda, a vision scientist on the team told The Guardian.

How was the experiment conducted?

Humans start perceiving the thousands of colours after light falls on the colour-sensitive cells on the retina called cones. Three types of cones, long (L), medium (M) and short (S), that are sensitive to colour based on the light’s wavelength.

The team at Berkeley aimed to overcome this challenge. They started by charting a small section of a person’s retina to locate the exact positions of their M cones. Using a laser, they then scanned the retina, and each time the laser aligned with an M cone—compensating for any eye movement—it delivered a brief, precise pulse of light to activate that individual cell before proceeding to the next one.

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The colour lies outside the natural visual spectrum because it results from the near-exclusive stimulation of the M cones—something that natural light is incapable of producing. The name “olo” is derived from the binary code 010, representing that among the L, M, and S cones, only the M cones are activated.