Radio Cadena Agramonte emisiora de Camagüey
USA, April 24 - There is a new color, outside the known chromatic scale, never seen before by the human eye, which has been born thanks to technology: it is called olo.
So far, only the five participants in an experiment have been able to admire it: it's a color never before seen by the human eye, a blue-green hue reminiscent of peacock blue or aqua green, but with a saturation level completely off the scale that makes it incredibly intense and unlike any other color.
It's called 'olo' and is the result of a trick: using a laser to extremely selectively activate certain cells in the retina, researchers led by the University of California, Berkeley, managed to trick the eye, allowing it to perceive this new color.
The discovery, published in the journal Science Advances, could open the door to the creation of new colors and allow people with color blindness to see shades they had previously been unable to perceive.
The basis of color vision in humans is found in three different types of photoreceptors, that is, cells located in the retina that capture different wavelengths of light: the shortest ones for blue, the intermediate ones for green and the longest ones for red.
Each color originates from a characteristic activation pattern of these three cell types.
The study's authors, led by Ren Ng, then wondered if it would be possible to generate a new color by specifically stimulating these photoreceptors.
After mapping each participant's retina, marking the position and type of each cell, they activated only a few using microdoses of laser light.
The participants were then asked to compare what they were seeing with normal colors, but this proved impossible: the color Olo appears to be much more intense than even the most vibrant hues, and the comparison only becomes possible if it is considerably dimmed by the addition of white light.
This is not the first time that individual photoreceptors have been stimulated, but in this case the activated area was large enough to substantially alter visual perception. (Text and Photo: Cubasí)
