Photo by Hamish on UnsplashAn experiment in human photoreceptors allowed scientists to recently define a new color, imperceptible by the human eye, that lies along the blue-green spectrum but is different from the two.The team, who experimented on themselves and others, hope their findings could one day help improve tools for studying color blindness or lead to new technologies for creating colors in digital imagery.“Theoretically, novel colors are possible through bypassing the constraints set by the cone spectral sensitivities…” the authors write in their abstract. “In practice, we confirm a partial expansion of colorspace toward that theoretical ideal.”The team from University of California, Berkeley and the University of Washington used pioneering laser technology which they called “Oz” to “directly control the human eye’s photoreceptor activity via cell-by-cell light delivery.”Color is generated in our vision through the transmission of light in cells called photoreceptors. Eye tissue contain a series of cones for this task, and the cones are labeled as L, S, or M cones.In normal color vision, the authors explain, any light that stimulates an M cone cell must also stimulate its neighboring L and/or S cones because the M cone spectral response function lies between that of the L and S cones.“However, Oz stimulation can by definition...
