A team of scientists claims to have discovered a new color that humans cannot see without the help of technology.
Researchers based in the United States said they had been able to “experiment” the color, which they named “Olo”, pulling laser pulses in their eyes using a device named after the Oz assistant.
Olo cannot be seen in the naked eye, but the five people who saw him describe it as being similar to Teal.
What does the study found?
Professors of the University of California, Berkeley and the Medicine School of the University of Washington published an article in the journal, Science Advances, on April 18 in which they presented their discovery of a shade beyond the range of human vision.
They explained that they had designed a technique called Oz, which can “deceive” the human eye to see Olo. The technique is named after the Oz assistant.
In the wonderful sorcerer of Oz, published in 1900, Frank Baum wrote on a man who uses tips to deceive residents of Oz’s fictitious earth, thinking he is a sorcerer. For example, it is believed that the emerald city, the capital of Oz, is so brilliant and vibrant that visitors must wear special glasses to protect their eyes. Glasses are one of the sorcerer’s tips because they make the city greener and larger.
How do humans perceive color?
The human eye perceives color via three types of photoreceptors or “conical cells” in the retina. The cones collect shorter light wavelengths in light; M cones detect medium green wavelengths; And the cones detect longer red wavelengths.
“The signals of these cones are then sent through a complex series of retina cells which act to clean and integrate the signal before transmitting it in the optic nerve through certain parts of the brain,” Al Jazeera Francis Windram, research partner in the London Sciences Department of London, told Al Jazeera.
The part of the brain to which visual information is transmitted is the visual cortex.
How did scientists find the “new” color?
In a normal vision, the function of m rides riding with the S and the neighbors, so that any light which stimulates the cones M activates the other two cones. The M cones do not work alone.
“There is no wavelength in the world which cannot stimulate that the Conical M,” said a teacher of electrical and computer engineering at UC Berkeley, in an article published on his website.
“I started to ask myself what it would look like if you could just stimulate all the cells of the cone M. if the greenest green you have ever seen?”
NG therefore associated itself with Austin Roorda, one of the creators of OZ technology and professor of optometry and science of vision at UC Berkeley.
Oz, which Roorda has described as “a microscope to look at the retina”, uses tiny microdoses of laser light to target individual photoreceptors in the eye. The equipment, which must be highly stabilized during use, is already used to study eye diseases.
The work using OZ began in 2018 by James Carl Fong, a doctoral student in electrical engineering and computer science in UC Berkeley. Hannah Doyle, another doctoral student in Berkeley, conducted the experiences through which human subjects could see the new color, Olo.
Is Olo really a new color?
The shadow of Olo has always existed, it falls just beyond the spectrum of shades visible to the human eye. There are others such nuances that we cannot see. Therefore, Olo is not a new color that has emerged, from a physical or scientific point of view.
However, “from a sociolinguistic point of view, if people give new names to the colors that were previously indistinguishable thanks to this technology, then perhaps! It all depends on how you say, “said Windram.
How many people have seen Olo?
Five people saw the “new” color – four men and a woman. All had a vision of normal colors.
Three of the subjects, including Roorda and NG, are the co-authors of the research document while the other two are members of the laboratory participating in the University of Washington and were not aware of the study objective before participating.
What does Olo look like?
Those who saw Olo describe it as a colorful or blue green color – but they had never seen before.
In the article by UC Berkeley, it is described as a “blue-green color of unrivaled saturation”.
“It was like a deeply saturated Sarcelle … The most saturated natural color was just pale in comparison,” said Roorda.
“I was not a subject for this newspaper, but I saw Olo since, and it’s very striking. You know you look at something very blue-green,” said Doyle.
The researchers said that an image of a Sarcelle square is the nearest color correspondence to Olo. However, this square is not an olo-color square. The naked human eye just can’t see the shadow.
“We are not going to see Olo on smartphone screens or so early televisions.
And if some colors are invisible not because they are rare, but because we cannot see them physically?
UC Berkeley scientists have discovered Olo – a shade that cannot be returned, only experienced.
Olo can never join the Pantone color system … or will it?https://t.co/sbrgvhw85g pic.twitter.com/rxmbutd7y2
– Pantone (@Pantone) April 23, 2025
Could this technology help people with color blindness?
Berkeley researchers explore if OZ technology could help people with color blindness.
Windram said that success would depend on the cause of the mouthful in individuals. Deuteromaly, which causes a decrease in sensitivity to green light, is the most common form of color blindness.
“In this case, a miniaturized version of this technology could theoretically be used to correct it by stimulating the cones directly when the right light color strikes them,” said Windra.
Windram pointed out that research advertising equipment shows Oz experience images on a highly stabilized table.
“This would require a lot of work to miniature technology, and is probably far away. Since the laser must stable the correct cones in order to stimulate them, this may not really be possible as a form of technological vision correction,” he said.
How do we know how people “see” color?
The concept of a color has three main components, explained Windram: the physical, which has to do with the wavelengths of the light that meet the eye; The neurological, which refers to the way in which humans drawn these light signals biologically; and the societal or linguistic component, which concerns how the colors are named.
“In the end, I can see a color and call it” red “, someone else can call it” rot “or” red “… but also another can look at it a little more closely and say” well it’s black “or” crimson “.”
To test this, the researcher of neuroscience and AI, Patrick Mineault, has developed a website For entertainment purposes in September 2024, on which users can take a test to see how their color perception compared to others.
Humans can also perceive color differently due to the differences in factors such as the “temperature” of light. This was demonstrated when a photo of a dress became viral in 2015, dividing social media users to find out if the dress was white and gold, or blue and black.
Windram explained that the people who decided what colors the dress were on preconceived concepts to find out if the photo of the dress was taken in hot lighting or fresh lighting.
Do animals see the color differently from humans?
Yes, different species can experience colors differently.
For example, humans treat three wavelengths corresponding to the red, blue and green light, while the mantle shrimp, a tiny crustacean, can visually perceive 12 colored channels instead of three. An article by the Australian Academy of Science explains that mantle shrimps can also detect ultraviolet and polarized light, which humans cannot see.
However, while the human eye can mix two colors and perceive an intermediate shade – like purple like a mixture of red and blue – the mante’s shrimp eyes cannot mix color receptors.
Meanwhile, dogs have only two types of cones and can especially see only shades of yellow and blue.