5 ms·

It's very exciting for me to dream of a future where we manage to tap into the visual cortex and maybe then we'll be able to see as if we had 4 or maybe more co

• schoen 10y ago
  Nope, the trichromatic vision is the reason we use color spaces like RGB -- it means that combinations of three colors can produce nearly all of the subjective hues that we experience. The idea of "three primary colors" comes from trichromatic vision; there's nothing about physics that implies that there should only be three primary colors, and machines can be built to distinguish an unlimited range of hue combinations that are not regarded as built up from any finite number of primary colors, whereas human vision simply can't make these distinctions. Tetrachromatic vision means a four-dimensional color space which will have to use four, not three, primary colors in order to represent all subjective hues through combinations. So you would need to add another channel on top of RGB. The bit depth in a color space is effectively about how many different intensities of each primary color can be distinguished (although you can have a system that measures or distinguishes colors in terms of other features instead). So if you have a greater color depth, you can make more fine-grained distinctions about the intensive of the primary colors, but having a new primary color (that reaches otherwise-unrepresentable colors!) is something else entirely.
  • gm-conspiracy 10y ago
    What about CMYK for tetrachromatic?
    • thaumasiotes 10y ago
      CMYK is three colors. K is just black. You could analogously call the RGB color space RGBW, but it wouldn't mean you were suddenly working with four colors.
    • quirkot 10y ago
      It would still be RGB with an extra. Like RGB+X
    • scardine 10y ago
      I think the primary difference between CMYK and RGB is that CMYK is a subtractive color space, while RGB is cumulative (I don't know if these are the correct terms in English). The first is used for reflective surfaces, while the other is used for light sources. On reflexive surfaces, you make colors by subtracting wave lengths (the paint has pigments that absorb specific wavelengths). On light sources, like our computer screens, we make color by combining primary wavelengths.
  • masklinn 10y ago
    > Nope, the trichromatic vision is the reason we use color spaces like RGB -- it means that combinations of three colors can produce nearly all of the subjective hues that we experience. There are lots of RGB color spaces though, and the widespread sRGB colorspace only supports a fairly small section of the human subjective color space, it's especially poor in the greens and blues
  • daveloyall 10y ago
    Forgive my ignorance, please... I don't understand this color space thing, much less a 4D color space. Here's what I do know: All light has some wavelength. That wavelength determines the color. Red light has a longer wavelength than violet light. Infrared is longer still. Ultraviolet has a more narrow wavelength than violet. ROYGBIV So, I think of color as a number line... But it wraps around. So: O Y R G VIB R + Y = 0 Y + B = G ...etc Why would a tetrachromatic person see a color sphere instead of a larger color wheel (more than 7 letters on it)?
    • wonnage 10y ago
      Color isn't a physical property. Normal color vision is the sum of three signals. Tetrachromacy is equivalent to having a fourth signal, so you need an extra axis. Color spaces are weird in that cones have overlapping ranges (so the signals are not independent), and there's an added linguistic/perceptual step in the brain.
      • daveloyall 10y ago
        I don't buy it. The different types of cones are all sensing the same physical property: wavelength. Each type of clone is more sensitive to some specific range of wavelengths (detail: the graphs of sensitivity vs wavelength for each type are approximately but not exactly bell curves).[0] TRICHROMATIC ------------ L M S <--long, medium, short cone cells R O Y G B I V 6 5 5 5 4 4 4 <--wavelength (read down) 5 9 7 1 7 4 0 0 0 0 0 5 5 0 So your visual system does the math to determine the scalar value of the color that is being perceived. If M cones are firing a lot and L and S cones only a little, it's a blue green. If L fires a little and M less so and S hardly at all, it's a red. Etc. Adding another type doesn't change the nature (dimensionality) of color, it merely changes two things: 1. the math you use to determine that scalar. and 2. your ability to distinguish between 650nm light and 651nm light (perhaps). Perhaps this will make it clear: imagine one million different types of cone cells, each with some distinct sensitivity range. That doesn't give you a million-dimension space. It would certainly give you the ability to tell the difference between 510nm light and 510.05nm light, though! 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell
• hammock 10y ago
  More like 8 to 16 bit. Tetrachromats see 100x more color. 16 bit has 256x more colors than 8 bit.