Think you’ve seen all the colors that exist? Maybe not. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Washington have created a new system that controls the eye’s photoreceptors to help it see new colors, as reported in the journal Science Advances last week.
Researchers didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The system, called Oz, works by activating cone cells in the retina — in short, firing laser pulses at researchers’ eyes — to push the eye past “spectral sensitivities” and to “elicit a color beyond the natural human gamut.”
In this case, respondents described the color as a “blue-green of unprecedented saturation.”
Even those who worked on the research were impressed.
“We predicted from the beginning that it would look like an unprecedented color signal but we didn’t know what the brain would do with it,” said Ren Ng, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, in an interview with The Guardian. “It was jaw-dropping. It’s incredibly saturated.”
The researchers say it’s impossible to fully convey this color over a monitor, but a swatch they shared with The Guardian resembles a bright turquoise.
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