2025 will go down in history as the year in which a new color was discovered: olo. Thanks to a study carried out by a group of scientists from the Berkeley UniversityCalifornia, published by the magazine ‘Science Advances’a tone that has never before been registered by the human eye has just been detected with the help of laser technology.
Unfortunately, this historic discovery cannot be part of our daily lives because it is not possible to see the olo without subjecting the retina to the baptized person. Oz Vision System (yes, that Oz you’re thinking of). We tell you what the experiment consisted of and what the famous work of L. Frank Baum has to do with it.
Getty Images.
How did you discover the new color, olo?
According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, “the retina is the layer of nerve cells that line the back wall inside the eye; it detects light and sends signals to the brain to see.” A type of cells that make it up are called conical or cones and “they give us vision of colors and details” thanks to their photophotoreceptor capacity.
In turn, these are divided into three types according to the wavelengths (color) they can perceive: S-blue, L-red and M-green. But they cannot act completely independently; they all respond in different proportions to the stimuli that the retina receives.
Starting from the idea that an unknown world hides before this natural impossibility of the human eye to focus only on one wavelength, the researchers designed a device composed of mirrors, lasers and optical devices that, through laser shots in the pupilstimulates only one type of cone to explore how the world looks this way.
By activating only the M cone cells, all five participants perceived a greenish blue color of intense saturation and brightness never seen before that scientists called «olo«. They named the device, Ozand to the procedure, Oz Vision Systemin honor of the great resemblance to the color of the façade and interior of the Royal Palace of Oz located in the Emerald City that appears in the famous fantasy novel, ‘The Wizard of Oz’, written by L. Frank Baum in 1940.