I came across an HN thread and some news articles about "Olo" and went into a bit of a rabbit hole.
Olo is supposed to be a brand new color, which can only be seen through blasting lasers into your eyes.
5 subjects apparently have seen this, and they described it as a "blue-green of unprecedented saturation".
What's Olo
All of this is internet-collated info, I'm not an expert.
Ok so there's 2 types of photoreceptors in our eyes - rods and cones. The cones, then, are of 3 types:
- L-cones: Long wavelength, red
- M-cones: Medium wavelength, green
- S-cones: Short wavelength, blue
image by BenRG via Wikimedia Commons.
The curves overlap, and M in particular sits almost entirely underneath L. As in, there's no way to exclusively hit M-cones or see "true green" or whatever that color is actually supposed to be.
So the scientists who "discovered this new color" (new or not is controversial apparently) blasted lasers to only activate M-cones, making the test subjects see this (L, M, S) = (0, 1, 0) color aka Olo.
The closest color on the RGB spectrum is supposed to be #00ffcc:
..which is teal.
So there's no way to actually experience this Olo.
Or is it?
Full credit to dynomight's write-up on this. Please read it.
The idea is to exhaust the L-cones (by staring at red for a circle) so that our green hits typical M-cones, but less of L-cones.
Witness magic:
Stare at the dot in the middle
(takes a minute),
don't move your head or your eyes,
blinking is ok tho.
Based on dynomight's cone saturation generator. Try at max brightness.
OMG
That felt insane!
Is this actually Olo? idk.
There is apparently a technical term for this called "Chimerical colors". So it's perhaps not the real deal.
It is very very cool regardless! The way the eyes kinda twitch and see those super-duper-saturated teal arcs.
Enjoy!