Olo (Color)

(en.wikipedia.org)

199 points by inigyou5 days ago

16 comments

GolfPopper4 hours ago
It is possible to see something close (how close I don't know) by saturating the S & M cones instead of avoiding them. Wikipedia refers to these as 'chimerical colors':<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color#Chimerical_colors" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color#Chimerical_co...</a>
- Georgelemental3 hours ago
 Demonstration of this: <a href="https://dynomight.net/colors/" rel="nofollow">https://dynomight.net/colors/</a> (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44594808">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44594808</a>)
 - yboris2 hours ago
 Love this - references one of my favorite ever optical experiences Eclipse of Titan<a href="https://www.skytopia.com/project/illusion/ipage-et.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.skytopia.com/project/illusion/ipage-et.html</a>
 - reoKaneshiro16 minutes ago
 Wow, mind /eye blowing! Very insightful, thank you!
 - rashkov1 hour ago
 wow, highly recommended
 - pwillia734 minutes ago
 incredible
 - toxik3 hours ago
 This was very interesting, thank you for the link.
hdz3 hours ago
The closest approximation to Olo colored paint you can buy is also by the company that makes some of the blackest black paint. I haven't used it personally. <a href="https://culturehustle.com/collections/paint/products/yolo-newly-discovered-colouriest-colour" rel="nofollow">https://culturehustle.com/collections/paint/products/yolo-ne...</a>
- c221 hour ago
 They also make the orangiest orange paint, the yellowest yellow, the pinkest pink, etc. At a certain point I have to wonder how much these are accurate descriptors of the paint colors vs arbitrary made up marketing nonsense.
- jhiesey1 hour ago
 Note that there has been controversy for the last few years around Culture Hustle not fulfilling orders and doing other sketchy things. Just a heads up.
- kridsdale11 hour ago
 Obligatory “Fuck Anish Kapoor”<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/FUCKYOUINPARTICULAR/comments/1dxlt66/fuck_anish_kapoor/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/FUCKYOUINPARTICULAR/comments/1dxlt6...</a>
- kiddico1 hour ago
 Lol $11280.99 now marked down to $33.99!
drayfield4 hours ago
Is it too late to rename it to Octarine?<a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octarine" rel="nofollow">https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octarine</a>
- phikappa4 hours ago
 In my headcanon octarine is a colour between orange and deep purple. Sometimes it has a hazy blackish halo.
 - indrora4 hours ago
 I've always taken it to be that the color is unique to the situation/viewer -- a sort of pearlescent void-color that can't be described in any known language, but which just Is. More a physical phenomenon than an actual color, but distinctly hued somehow.
 - dejobaan2 hours ago
 I always thought it was something like <a href="https://www.moodlight.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.moodlight.org/</a> (set to 60 colors/second) or <a href="https://flashing-colors.com/" rel="nofollow">https://flashing-colors.com/</a> (set to 100 colors/second).Note that those are possibly photosensitive epilepsy risks if you turn them up to 60/100.
- ChrisMarshallNY4 hours ago
 +1 for the Sir Terry reference.I suspect many animals experience color quite differently, including seeing infrared/ultraviolet, etc.
 - tiagod2 hours ago
 No suspicion needed, that's a very well studied fact.
- Razengan3 hours ago
 My thoughts as soon as I saw the title :)
jeremyjh13 minutes ago
Reminds me a bit of a Greg Egan story from Instantiation called Seventh Sight. Kids with artificial eyes hack them to see colors and spectrum not perceptible by humans.
kveykva3 hours ago
This reads like an SCP article
- Luc3 hours ago
  Ah, thank you. Couldn’t put my finger on it.
m-hodges2 hours ago
Brown<a href="https://youtu.be/wh4aWZRtTwU" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/wh4aWZRtTwU</a>
throwaway274481 hour ago
This is how people talk about how ancient greeks viewed blue, except we actually can't see this color normally.
- MarkusQ1 hour ago
 The stuff about ancient Greeks not seeing blue is absolute internet balderdash.
semolino3 hours ago
Having read this comment from today detailing variance in the default Windows 95 background (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329282">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329282</a>), I'm imagining Olo would be your wallpaper if "257 colors" could be supported.
amberjack2 hours ago
I wonder how long it will take until this is some kind of an amusement park thing or whatever.
dylan6042 hours ago
"They then used lasers to deliver tiny doses of light"I didn't know there was funding for this
- tantalor2 hours ago
 > Funding: This work was supported by a Hellman Fellowship (R.N.), FHL Vive Center Seed Grant (R.N.), Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant FA9550-20-1-0195 (J.F., C.W., W.S.T., A.R., and R.N.), Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant FA9550-21-1-0230 (J.F., H.K.D., C.W., A.E.B., S.R.H., V.P.P., W.S.T., R.S., A.R., and R.N.), National Institutes of Health grant R01EY023591 (A.E.B., B.P.S., P.T., J.E.V., W.S.T., A.R., and R.N.), National Institutes of Health grant R01EY029710 (V.P.P. and R.S.), National Institutes of Health grant U01EY032055 (V.P.P., R.S., and A.R.), and a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface (R.S.).<a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12007580/" rel="nofollow">https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12007580/</a>
pixel_popping2 hours ago
Time for a trip then.
goosethe4 hours ago
how bout Grorange
gste3 hours ago
> Only the five subjects of the Berkeley experiment have officially seen olo.Basically equivalent tosource: trust me bro
- orthoxerox2 hours ago
 There's a link to Dynomight's webpage in another comment thread. I've seen olo myself with it. It's to cyan what ultramarine is to sRGB blue.
- IAmBroom2 hours ago
 The word "officially" is the massive wiggle-word here.Only one person on Earth has officially seen the color of my coffee mug. Send me Venmo for $10, and I'll officiate your viewing of the attached JPG....
 - SamBam2 hours ago
 Except that this requires extremely specialized equipment to individually trigger specific cone cells in your eyes, so I expect they have a pretty damn good idea of who has seen this and who hasn't.
 - moralestapia1 hour ago
 So, source: trust me bro.
timonoko2 hours ago
...
- SamBam2 hours ago
 You can't have discovered this same color, solve it requires specialized equipment to see it.The color in the Wikipedia article is just a rough approximation.
 - timonoko2 hours ago
 I know that. In pure form that color it is both yellow and blue without being green. You sometimes see it in sunsets.
 - SamBam1 hour ago
 No, because that's not understanding what this technology, and our cone cells, are doing.For example, yellow has a wavelength of ~580nm. When that wavelength enters our eyes it activates both the M and the L cone cells, with the L slightly more. That differential activation between the two types of cells gives us the experience of yellow.Blue actually activates all our cone cells, with S the most and a tiny bit of M and L.What this technology does is selectively activate only the M cone cells.There is no possible wavelength that activates only the M cone cells, because the combined activation spectrum of the S and L cone cells overlaps the entirely of the M spectrum. There's nothing natural that can enter our eyes and activate M without also activating L and/or S.Therefore no one can ever have had the experience of having only their M cone cells activated with anything in the natural world. It can only have been done with this technology.As for the experience of seeing olo, the qualia, that's almost arbitrary. The authors originally thought it was going to be the "greenest green" but it wasn't really. It wasn't possible to predict what the qualia would be, because the brain has never had that experience. For all they knew they might not have seen anything, because the brain could have just thrown up it's hands at this nonsense signal. Instead they happened to experience this teal-like color. But that wasn't a priori obvious. It's just the brain struggling to apply an experience to nonsense.It is similar to tiring out the S and L cone cells and then looking away as you say elsewhere -- the authors mention that in the long-form article in The New Yorker -- but this is much clearer and more saturated.
 - timonoko2 hours ago
 ---
 - timonoko2 hours ago
 Goddammit. Now I remembered how you see this color. You stare the some shape of 0xFF0030 and then close yores eyes and the inverted color appears.
 reaperducer1 hour ago
 You stare the some shape of 0xFF0030 and then close yores eyes and the inverted color appears.So, the cover of R.E.M.'s 1988 record titled Green, which is actually orange. You're supposed to stare at it, then close your eyes, and you see the album cover as it's intended to be viewed.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_(R.E.M._album)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_(R.E.M._album)</a>
 timonoko1 hour ago
 Can I get note in Wikipedia for inventing this 40 years ago?
dorianmariecom4 hours ago
lol
- trembolram3 hours ago
  lol is the complementary color of olo in the theoretical lms color space.
  - kridsdale11 hour ago
    I guess it’s #FF0033 or so.
- ihaveajob3 hours ago
  No, that's a different color.