9 ms·
Novel color via stimulation of individual photoreceptors at population scale
- K0balt 1y agoWhat is meant by population scale in this context?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- throwanem 1y agoVery Snow Crash, maybe. If I recall, the cyberdecks in that story used lasers to draw on the user's retinas, rather than an HMD.
- NitpickLawyer 1y agoMicrosoft Research had a project like this at one point, with "goggles" that used lasers on your retina instead of LCDs to project images. No idea what happened to the project, as I haven't heard anything recently.
- corysama 1y agoI swear I remember reading in the 80s about the Air Force having monochrome VR goggles consisting of a per-eye laser, magnetic oil lens for per-pixel depth focus, two perpendicular rotating mirrors for the raster scan and a curved glass lens to reflect and focus the raster scan on to the retina.
- fy20 1y agoImagine walking through a shopping mall and suddenly having a Nike logo projected directly onto your retine, obscuring everything you see.
- Levitz 1y ago"Welp, time for terrorism I guess"
- throwanem 1y agoYeah, I mean I haven't been to Vegas myself, but I've had pillow talk with some people who went. (All illuminated signage could be said to draw on one's retinas, after all. The major differences I see with this method beyond improved gamut are first that it rasters, and second that I think we have to worry what happens if it fails to raster...)
- jonas21 1y ago> Five subjects were recruited for this experiment ... Subjects 10001R, 10003L, and 20205R are coauthors on the paper and were blinded to the test conditions but were aware of the purposes of the study. The other two subjects were members of the participating lab at the University of Washington but were naive to the purposes of the study. Is it normal for the authors to experiment on themselves and their colleagues like this? Or did they not like the idea of laser-stimulating the photoreceptors of random strangers?
- pvg 1y agoThat is the tradition. I tooke a bodkin gh & put it betwixt my eye & the bone as neare to the Backside of my eye as I could: & pressing my eye with the end of it (soe as to make the curvature a, bcdef in my eye) there appeared severall white darke & coloured circles https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/NATP00004#:~:text=58-,I%20tooke%20a%20bodkin,-gh%20%26%20put%20it https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/NAT...
- sebmellen 1y agoWow, I never knew that Newton risked retinal detachment to prove his theories.
- gnabgib 1y agoNot a Neal Stephenson fan then? (The Baroque Cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle)
- parpfish 1y agoAlso google “Giles Brindley” for another great self-experimentation tale
- krispyfi 1y agoAlso Albert Hofmann and Alexander Shulgin
- robertclaus 1y agoThere is a theory that specific shades of colors are difficult to recognize or differentiate unless you name them. I wonder how unique these 100% saturated colors would look without context compared to other colors.
- qingcharles 1y agoA great many languages don't differentiate between green and blue. There is simply one word for both.
- Muromec 1y agoA great deal of languages only have one blue color
- carlosjobim 1y agoLearning to see is a skill that we have to train. If you ever try to paint or draw a picture from a photographic reference, you will realize that you've spent your whole life blind. Even with the photo right in front of you, it can be extremely hard to paint certain details, because the brain simply refuses to accept the photographic reality when it has another idea of how an object should look. As for colour, language does not help very much with being able to see and understand them. What helps more is playing with photographic software and getting a feel for the relations within a system like HSL, or RGB.
- tianqi 1y agoThis story makes me remember that I had heard a fun fact a long time ago that many people have never actually seen the colour "violet" which is a single wavelength of visible light. Because there are very few things that reflect only this wavelength in reality. The purple colour we see is formed from a mixture of red and blue, whether it's something in nature, screen displaying or printing. I was so intrigued that I bought a 405nm laser torch and invited some friends to a home party to ‘See the real violet’. That single wavelength of purple really made a different experience, and with good friends, we had a great day. The olo experiment was very interesting, and it told me that today we even have the technology to stimulate a single cone cell one by one in time. I know that we can't accurately display the olo on screen right now, which also prevents any of these articles from actually containing a picture of the olo. I think it's very close to #00FFEE, and I'm making it the colour of my Hacker News's top bar.
- tines 1y ago> Because there are very few things that reflect this wavelength in reality. You mean few things that reflect only this wavelength? Because I would think anything white would reflect this wavelength just like any other.
- tianqi 1y agoYes, I meant reflecting only this wavelength. Thanks.
- subb 1y agoYou did send a specific wavelength to your retina, but that wasn't violet. Because violet is a construct by your brain. Color is not a property of wavelength. There's nothing special about photons wiggling in the 380 to 750nm range. In general it's not necessary to be this pendatic, but given the topic here, I think it's important to realize this. It takes a while because we are so good at projecting our internal experience outward. Remember the blue / black dress?
- tianqi 1y ago
- foota 1y agoMy shitpost is that they're lucky they didn't trigger a buffer overflow :-) but really, it doesn't seem completely out of question to me that it's possible that some unintended and serious consequence could occur from your brain receiving some stimulus that it doesn't naturally receive. I guess maybe there's no biological analog, but obviously bad things can happen in circuits, computers, etc., when this happens.
- ImHereToVote 1y agoWe can do this test on an ANN.
- braingravy 1y agoThe brain is remarkably resilient to that type of issue… Temporary buffer overflow (if you like) can be easily induced and observed with chemicals that modify function at the receptor level; Psychedelics being a classic example. (Worth noting there are many such chemicals used in medicine and research that induce overflow in function besides perception.) What I find fascinating is the neurological resilience that can be observed at cellular and behavioral levels to bounce back after an event like that. Non-chemical interventions, like adaption wearing special glasses that flip vision(1), are quickly accounted for by a healthy brain. 1:https://www.npr.org/2012/12/14/167255705/a-view-from-the-flip-side https://www.npr.org/2012/12/14/167255705/a-view-from-the-fli...
- OscarCunningham 1y agoAn easy way to percieve an oversaturated colour like this is to stare at one colour for a long time, and then switch to its complementary colour. The superposition of the colour and the afterimage of the same colour produces a more intense effect.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Skgqie1 1y agoYour comment reminded me of an old short story: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story)
- foota 1y agoThis is really fascinating to me. I'm amazed they're able to image the cells of the eye with sufficient resolution and speed to achieve this. From the paper, "and targeting 10^5 visible-wavelength laser microdoses per second to each cone cell.". If I understand correctly, they first use one type of spectroscopy (AO-OCT) to image the eye and build a map classifying the type of cells, and then use AO-SLO to find the positions of cells in real time. I assume that AO-OCT can't image at a sufficient rate for the second part (or they would just use one type?) so they need to first build this classification map, and then use it to match the position of cells to their type (e g., by overlaying the positions of cells with the classifications and making them line up).
- ratatoskrt 1y agoThe Guardian's article on this[1] includes a quote from an eminent colour expert at City: > The claim left one expert bemused. “It is not a new colour,” said John Barbur, a vision scientist at City St George’s, University of London. “It’s a more saturated green that can only be produced in a subject with normal red-green chromatic mechanism when the only input comes from M cones.” The work, he said, had “limited value”. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/apr/18/scientists-claim-to-have-found-colour-no-one-has-seen-before?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/apr/18/scientists-c...
- codesnik 1y agoidentifying and shining light only on specific type of cells on retina through the iris is of limited value? I personally didn't know we even have that kind of precision.
- ratatoskrt 1y agoIt's just a typical response. What he means (in an admittedly unnecessary, snarky way) is that this is not going to revolutionise perceptual colour science. It's not going to be an out-of-this-world experience, nor will it change our understanding of how humans perceive colour. I personally think it's pretty cool, though.
- mmooss 1y agoAgreed; that and the fact that it can be programmatic is either the major result or one of two. The title of the paper is, Novel color via stimulation of individual photoreceptors at population scale And they say, These results are proof-of-principle for programmable control over individual photoreceptors at population scale.
- shermantanktop 1y agoAs a colorblind person, I look forward to you normies arguing over whether a dress is green or “super green.”
- nkrisc 1y agoLet’s just settle it with a spectrometer.
- fouronnes3 1y agoSpectromers don't measure the subjective perception of color.
- nkrisc 1y agoOf course, but trying to agree on the precise subjective perception of color is fruitless since no two people will perceive all wavelengths of visible light exactly the same.
- InsideOutSanta 1y agoThere are a bunch of "weird" colors that we don't see naturally. Wikipedia has a page on them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color Some can be created at home without any special equipment. For example, you can't mix red and green and create a "redgreen," but if you cross your eyes and have one eye see red and the other see green, you might see a new color you haven't seen before. I also see weird colors in displays with a high frame rate that cycle between colors quickly. And at one point, I had a laser shot in my eye, which destroyed part of my vision. Initially, in that spot, I saw a weird iridescent silver-greenish color I had never seen before. Although that was pretty cool, I wouldn't recommend repeating this involuntary experiment just to see that color.
- soulofmischief 1y agoStygian blue is my favorite. What an insane color.
- dataflow 1y agoI see it but it doesn't really feel like a new color? It just looks like blue on top of black. Maybe a new intensity, if I was being super generous, but not a new color.
- bigyabai 1y agoI think it qualifies as a new color. If we can't differentiate colors on saturation, hue or intensity then I don't know how there are supposed to be multiple colors at all. It seems like fair play by the scientists, if a bit shrewd in defining "new".
- dataflow 1y ago> If we can't differentiate colors on saturation, hue or intensity I don't think I follow. We can obviously distinguish all of these and do it on a daily basis... what do you mean we can't?
- exe34 1y agoit should be called octarine, since it was brought forth by the magic of science!
- perihelions 1y agoThere's another ongoing thread about this paper, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43736005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43736005 ("Scientists claim to have found colour no one has seen before (theguardian.com)" — 27 comments)
- mppm 1y agoVery cool! It would be cooler still if this technique could be used for future VR technology, creating full immersion by targeting all photoreceptors individually. But unfortunately... the optics of the eye does not actually allow individual cones to be fully isolated, as the spot size would be below the diffraction limit. They discuss this in Fig. 2 and the first section of the results. Even with a wide-open pupil and perfect adaptive optics, there would be 19% bleedover to nearby cells in high-density areas, while what they achieve in practice is 67% bleedover in a lower-density (off-center) area. This is enough to produce new effects in color perception, but not enough to draw crisp color images on the retina. :(
- thenoblesunfish 1y agoI wonder if hallucinogens or other altered mental states can produce this effect, by inducing these sorts of internal signals that can't be created by input through the normal channels.
- curtisszmania 1y agoThis breakthrough in visual perception feels like a glimpse into a future where our senses are no longer limited by biology. It’s the kind of innovation that reminds me why we pursue science—not just for answers, but for the questions it raises.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]