Pod Insights Short Wave Unveiling Olo — A Color Out of Oz! About this episode "Olo" does not exist in nature, nor can it be found among paint cans. But for a very select few, olo can be seen — through the intervention of careful computing and lasers. A team led by vision scientist Austin Roorda http://roorda.vision.berkeley.edu/ and computer scientist Ren Ng https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/yirenng.html at UC Berkeley figured out a method for stimulating only one specific subset of cones of the retina. It's the only way to view this spectacular teal. Creating the color is helping push the boundaries of vision science.
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0:00 Emily Kwong? This message comes from Avalara Aviator. Aviator is the agent hub for tax and compliance. Purpose-built AI agents work around the clock and across business systems to help execute the work. Visit avalara.com/aviator.
0:15 Emily Kwong? You're listening to Short Wave from NPR. Color is a trick of the light and a creation of our brain.
0:28 Speaker 01 It's actually very challenging to study color because of the complexity of it and how the perception is so context-dependent.
0:39 Emily Kwong? Austin Rourda is a professor of optometry and vision science at UC Berkeley, and he's likely the first person in the world to ever see a new color, meaning a color that does not exist in nature and was developed entirely in a lab. Austin and his collaborator, computer scientist Ren Ung, call this novel color "OLO."
1:00 Speaker 02 It's blue-green, it's a teal color, but it's just more saturated than any teal you can see in the natural world.
1:07 Emily Kwong? And to make this super saturated color, the team used a technique they call Oz, named after the movie The Wizard of Oz, which, as you may remember, starts in black and white until Dorothy emerges into a technicolor world.
1:24 Speaker 03 Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.
1:32 Speaker 03 We must be over the rainbow.
1:36 Speaker 01 And so Oz, in a way, to me, it's that effort to evoke a new sensation of color. And so we go from a normal colored world to this extraordinarily colored world through direct manipulation of the cells.
1:51 Emily Kwong? Was it like that for you? Like, I see the world in basic color, and this is super saturated?
1:56 Speaker 01 Well, I would say yes, but, you know, we're not looking at this in an IMAX theater. Our display is the size of an icon on your cellphone, or it's the size of your fingernail held at arm's length.
2:08 Emily Kwong? Today on the show, seeing OLO: how color perception works and how a swatch of color created by machines is pushing the boundaries of vision science. I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Short Wave from NPR.
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3:43 Emily Kwong? OK, Austin and Ren, let's talk about color. What is color, Austin? And for those of us who can see color, how are we able to?
3:50 Speaker 01 So humans have three types of cone photoreceptor, and they're sensitive to the long, middle, and short wavelengths of the visible light spectrum. So they're called L, M, and S.
4:03 Speaker 01 And with these three types of sensor, we can send information to the brain that will inform the brain about color. So it's the brain that looks at the subtle differences in the excitation of those three cone types to generate a percept of the color.
4:23 Speaker 01 So with just a mere three cone types, humans are able to differentiate arguably up to 10 million different hues in the visual world. And that's really through the extensive processing that the brain does. It's a very important part of the process.
4:41 Speaker 02 The three types of color cells in the retina, the reason they're sensitive to these three types of different parts of the visible spectrum is because they're filled with photopigments, which are proteins, okay? And those proteins come from our DNA, from three genes. Okay, so literally, our color vision is baked into our DNA, literally.
5:02 Emily Kwong? Are different people seeing different colors? If all three of us here were to look at a sunflower, would the yellow of the petals look a little different? Because are our cones unique to us in some way?
5:17 Speaker 02 Absolutely. And the people see colors in the world and experience them differently, for sure. And if you're a colorblind person, that is what we call dichromatic or hard dichromatic, is missing one of those three genes completely, okay? And when that happens, then what is that vision like? Actually, it's really hard to know what the experience of having another person's vision is. It's sort of impossible, right? And there's three types of this type of colorblindness. But the most common type would be an experience, we think, that sees the world only in shades of blue and yellow.
5:57 Speaker 02 Okay, so you don't see all the colors of the rainbow. You can't order the colors of the rainbow because you don't perceive them, okay? You perceive them as shades of blue and yellow. So absolutely, we're all seeing the world in different, you know, differently.
6:10 Emily Kwong? Fascinating, okay. Let's talk about your study. You set out to stimulate M cones without stimulating any neighboring L or S cones. And that doesn't happen in nature. So what did you want to know?
6:23 Speaker 02 If you did that, I guess the question becomes, do you see a square of color? Or is your brain just confused about what you see there? Do you see a black hole? Or, you know, what is it? And I thought, well, you know, I guess you would see a color. And I wanted to know, hey, does that look like? What does it look like? Does it look like the greenest green you've ever seen? And I want to call out James Fong and Hannah Doyle, amongst the many collaborators. But really, they stand as the people that did the hard work, had the perseverance and the smarts, the talent to really chase this down. It was so challenging. But the fruits of the labor is so valuable because it is really something that's never been done before. So there's no chartered course to it.
6:59 Emily Kwong? Right, and you did see something. You saw Olo. What's required to see this novel color?
7:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, there are a number of parts. First of all, in order to be able to consider even targeting only the M cones, you have to have a map of the cone mosaic of the three types of cones. So every subject in the study had to travel to the University of Washington, to our collaborator's lab, where he has a device to image the retina and with a special type of imaging called optical coherence tomography, he was able to label the cone types as being L, M, or S.
7:41 Emily Kwong? So he kind of mapped everyone's eye cones.
7:44 Speaker 01 That's right. So then, when we go to the lab, in the lab here, there's a few steps. One is you need to dilate your pupil. And then we bite into a bite plate called a bite bar, which gets locked into the device. So your head is held perfectly rigid. And then somebody else will align you in X, Y, and Z to get your pupil aligned with the output aperture of the system.
8:08 Emily Kwong? This really reminds me of going to the eye doctor.
8:12 Speaker 01 Exactly.
8:12 Emily Kwong? To test my vision. Go on.
8:14 Speaker 01 That's right. And then, now, there's one little important fact is that classifying the cones or generating maps of the cones is difficult. And nobody has ever mapped the cones right along the line of sight in an area called your fovea because the cones are really densely packed there. So we, instead, we mapped the cones a little bit away from the fovea, about half a millimeter away from the center of the fovea. And initially, while everything's getting set up, things look green, or just a regular green. Then, once everything gets into place, and you're carefully fixating, then, voop, you have this moment where it just turns to this saturated teal. And I was aware at that moment
8:59 Speaker 01 that we had succeeded, that we had created, that we were able to stimulate only the M cones. And James Fong, the lead author on the paper, he invented the name OLO because it's a binary code for 010, which represent the stimulation of the LM and S cones.
9:19 Emily Kwong? That's so smart. And as I understand it, you also had this teal laser next to OLO. And it was a laser containing the most saturated natural light you were able to generate so study participants could compare the colors. Right? That's kind of how you show that OLO isn't just teal. It's a completely different color.
9:37 Speaker 01 That's right.
9:39 Emily Kwong? What do you say to folks who wonder if OLO exists in nature in such a way that maybe other animals could see it?
9:47 Speaker 02 I love that question. To be clear, animals don't see the world in color anything like a human does. Right? Nothing like a human does. Animal eyes are vastly different than ours. And even our closest cousins on the evolutionary tree, their genes for those photopigments that we talked about earlier, they're not the same as for us. They don't have the same number as us. And they don't have the same genetic sequence. So its functional effect is, in the world for detecting light, is totally different. We know that. Like, hummingbirds, people have probably heard, or may have heard, some of the species can see it in UV light. We're blind to UV light, as one example. But every animal sees it completely differently. Another way you think about it is that,
10:33 Speaker 02 you know, we all look at a TV, we're like, wow, that color's pretty good. When your dog or your cat is sitting there looking at that TV, they do not see that and be like, wow, that kind of looks like, you know, that photo that we all took together outside the house this morning. It just, the colors don't look right. Okay?
10:48 Emily Kwong? How do you know? My cat can play the same video games as me. I think he's following.
10:53 Speaker 02 He might be following, but the colors won't look the same.
10:56 Emily Kwong? Yeah.
10:56 Speaker 02 So back to this question about, you know, could there be, you know, an animal that could see Olo? I received that question first and, oh, what a great question. But it's, it's actually that there's no way for that to happen because the experiential, you know, nature of the color for different species is just so vastly different.
11:15 Emily Kwong? Yeah. I recognize that you need a machine to see Olo, but for those of us at home, is there any way to approximate the Olo experience and to trick your eyes?
11:26 Speaker 01 Now, there's one type of situation where you can get an impression of what Olo might be. And that is if you desensitize or if you're exposed to a bright red light for a period of time.
11:44 Emily Kwong? I'm gonna do this at home. I want to see Olo so bad. Okay.
11:47 Speaker 01 So if you look at red light and you kind of adapt to red light, by looking at red light too much for a long period of time, you may desensitize to it or adapt to it. And then immediately following the adaptation to red light, you show a green light. And, and that approximates
12:05 Speaker 01 the condition that we generate with Olo whereby the M cones are preferentially stimulated more than what normal natural light would do. And so if you wanted to get a rough idea of what Olo looked like, you could do this, this adaptation trick. Now, the difference is that when we deliver Olo, we can make it last. It can persist.
12:34 Emily Kwong? Wow. You speak like such a steward of a color. And it's so, it's funny to me because like the pop culture craze around seeing Olo has got to be pretty funny for you all to witness. I, I read about an artist from the UK, Stuart Semple, who is selling for $10,000 pre-orders of a paint based on Olo called YOLO.
13:00 Speaker 01 Yep.
13:02 Emily Kwong? Which is, you know, you only live.
13:03 Speaker 02 Oh, I know. We love that.
13:06 Emily Kwong? What has been the funniest Olo homage or Olo plea that you've read about or seen?
13:14 Speaker 01 Well, I think I loved YOLO.
13:18 Speaker 01 The reason I loved it, of course, you can't make a paint that recreates Olo.
13:23 Emily Kwong? No, it seems like saturation is such a big part of this.
13:26 Speaker 01 That's right. It's all about saturation.
13:28 Emily Kwong? Production. It's not, it's not the hue.
13:29 Speaker 01 That's right. Stuart Semple totally realized that, and his paint was meant to sort of evoke a sensation, a feeling of Olo.
13:37 Emily Kwong? Yeah.
13:38 Speaker 01 And from what he describes, he kind of achieved that by adding some fluorescent components. Some say, well, Olo's no different than Taco Bell's Baja Blast. Okay. Some people say, I had the color Olo on my Nike sneakers back in 2015.
13:55 Speaker 01 And so it's, it's all been fun.
13:57 Emily Kwong? They're, they're experiencing FOMO, Olo. That's what that is. FOMO.
14:01 Speaker 01 Yes, we've had a bit of that.
14:03 Emily Kwong? Fear of missing out on Olo.
14:04 Speaker 01 That's right.
14:08 Emily Kwong? Thank you for sharing Olo with us on Short Wave and with the world. And we wish you luck with future adventures and advances in color, in human color vision science.
14:19 Speaker 01 Well, it's been a real pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for having us on, Emily.
14:24 Emily Kwong? Shortwavers, please like, follow, or subscribe to our show now. You will get a fun and fresh science episode in your feed four times a week. Today's episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kwasi Lee was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell's our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks for listening to Short Wave from NPR.
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