alt.hn

8/12/2026 at 10:26:14 AM

Olo (Color)

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olo_(color)

by inigyou

8/17/2026 at 4:37:06 PM

It is possible to see something close (how close I don't know) by saturating the S & M cones instead of avoiding them. Wikipedia refers to these as 'chimerical colors':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color#Chimerical_co...

by GolfPopper

8/17/2026 at 4:54:08 PM

Demonstration of this: https://dynomight.net/colors/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44594808)

by Georgelemental

8/17/2026 at 5:42:56 PM

Love this - references one of my favorite ever optical experiences Eclipse of Titan

https://www.skytopia.com/project/illusion/ipage-et.html

by yboris

8/18/2026 at 7:16:48 AM

BTW olo was not discovered in 2025

In ~2016 on the chan someone posted a completely unhinged post about this "bleen" "grue" color that nobody could see. it's probably lost to the ages now, but I remember it.

by deIeted

8/17/2026 at 9:50:01 PM

The fun part is the big red dot on the green background animation. Even before clicking it, as my eyes dart across it, small dark blue/black electric arc like shapes manifest all around the edges of the circle either reaching to the edge of the square or curving back to the circle like solar flares. I am red-green colorblind too.

by MisterTea

8/17/2026 at 9:46:37 PM

This is heroin for the eyes. Once the hit is over you want to take another one and if you don't it'll take ten minutes or so until the "real" world won't feel like a bleached sepia picture any more.

by formerly_proven

8/18/2026 at 4:39:29 AM

I saw the blue rim, but I didn't notice much effect on how the real world looked like after. But then, I'm red-green colourblind.

by eru

8/18/2026 at 7:21:52 AM

tbf it's more like methylamine + P2P meth for the eyes

by deIeted

8/18/2026 at 5:17:56 AM

These demos really drive home the chemical / biological part of visual perception to me. As I perceive these strange new colors I can almost feel the chemical processes occurring in my cones.

by EvanAnderson

8/18/2026 at 3:20:39 PM

Ok I watched the red green picture first and was getting pretty impressed that some type of optical illusion was making the circle appear smaller and smaller to me until it vanished!

Then I realized that wasn’t an optical illusion and instead just part of the setup…

by gdhkgdhkvff

8/18/2026 at 10:44:27 AM

I'm color blind. I do see a somewhat different, brighter color, but it isn't particularly different from normal colors. That's just me (and my fellow aberrants)?

by tgv

8/17/2026 at 8:22:38 PM

Wow, mind /eye blowing! Very insightful, thank you!

by reoKaneshiro

8/17/2026 at 6:39:19 PM

wow, highly recommended

by rashkov

8/17/2026 at 5:24:26 PM

This was very interesting, thank you for the link.

by toxik

8/18/2026 at 7:42:59 AM

weird shit that happen kinda happen to me a lot. i felt always that maybe my brain was malfunctioning.

i still kinda do, because it just happen at random when i am outside. sometimes, usually in bright morning light, sunny morning. no i dont look at the sun, yes mostly its visible looking at the blue of the sky.

last time i had it while in 1 on 1 with my manager. it took a lot of struggle not to try and rub my eye or tell her i was seeing this weird rainbow snake floating around.

overloaded cones, hopefully thats not some indication of something bad but just 'tired eyes'.

by saidnooneever

8/18/2026 at 9:27:31 AM

Is it perhaps a scintillating scotoma? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillating_scotoma

by elliottkember

8/18/2026 at 12:42:49 PM

If you are a migraineur, you will discover these being the purest of the pure of red, green and blue you will ever see.

by xattt

8/18/2026 at 1:34:54 PM

>this weird rainbow snake floating around.

Sounds like it might have been a 'floater':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floater

(I've had one myself for my whole life, a 'crystal worm'. I usually don't notice it, fortunately, but once it a while it will noticeably drift into my field of view while looking at a bright, blank field - like the blue sky or a monochrome computer screen.)

by GolfPopper

8/18/2026 at 7:58:23 AM

yer a wizard

by NetOpWibby

8/17/2026 at 8:03:50 PM

incredible

by pwillia7

8/17/2026 at 9:24:07 PM

If you are interested in "imaginary" colors, the gamut is actually well-specified, and (I hope it is appropriate to comment) that I made a visualization where you can drag a selection thumb over the gamut to see the "simulated" version of that color. Also include it is a 12-step contrast-sensitive color palette generator for said imaginary colors, which would allow you to make websites and (say) vscode themes using entirely imaginary colors! https://docs.moment.dev/d/hausdorff/2zmqjlmldchela29xvbzlbki...

by antics

8/17/2026 at 4:05:10 PM

Is it too late to rename it to Octarine?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octarine

by drayfield

8/17/2026 at 4:24:59 PM

In my headcanon octarine is a colour between orange and deep purple. Sometimes it has a hazy blackish halo.

by phikappa

8/17/2026 at 9:16:52 PM

I think it's described as a "greenish purple" in some of the books.

by riffraff

8/17/2026 at 4:37:23 PM

I've always taken it to be that the color is unique to the situation/viewer -- a sort of pearlescent void-color that can't be described in any known language, but which just Is. More a physical phenomenon than an actual color, but distinctly hued somehow.

by indrora

8/17/2026 at 5:55:47 PM

I always thought it was something like https://www.moodlight.org/ (set to 60 colors/second) or https://flashing-colors.com/ (set to 100 colors/second).

Note that those are possibly photosensitive epilepsy risks if you turn them up to 60/100.

by dejobaan

8/17/2026 at 4:23:53 PM

+1 for the Sir Terry reference.

I suspect many animals experience color quite differently, including seeing infrared/ultraviolet, etc.

by ChrisMarshallNY

8/17/2026 at 5:50:23 PM

No suspicion needed, that's a very well studied fact.

by tiagod

8/17/2026 at 5:35:56 PM

My thoughts as soon as I saw the title :)

by Razengan

8/18/2026 at 12:41:41 AM

I thought of "The Colour Out of Space".

by ameliaquining

8/17/2026 at 5:11:04 PM

The closest approximation to Olo colored paint you can buy is also by the company that makes some of the blackest black paint. I haven't used it personally. https://culturehustle.com/collections/paint/products/yolo-ne...

by hdz

8/17/2026 at 7:30:21 PM

They also make the orangiest orange paint, the yellowest yellow, the pinkest pink, etc. At a certain point I have to wonder how much these are accurate descriptors of the paint colors vs arbitrary made up marketing nonsense.

by c22

8/17/2026 at 9:41:54 PM

There is no "olo-colored" anything; that's the whole point. This is bordering on a scam.

by 22039dj9j3d

8/17/2026 at 6:53:08 PM

Note that there has been controversy for the last few years around Culture Hustle not fulfilling orders and doing other sketchy things. Just a heads up.

by jhiesey

8/17/2026 at 10:54:26 PM

I had ordered something from them and it took me initiating a chargeback for them to ship anything at all. The product that arrived was of terrible quality, and their customer support email is completely useless as well, any email gets a canned "your email is very important to us!" style response. My bank denied my second chargeback request because they had technically shipped something.

by rebeccajae

8/18/2026 at 9:17:50 AM

I've seen those complaints going around but, to add a picoGladwell of data, I've not had any problems with fulfilling orders or anything like that.

by zimpenfish

8/17/2026 at 6:53:21 PM

Lol $11280.99 now marked down to $33.99!

by kiddico

8/18/2026 at 1:33:11 PM

This is part of the shtick - $34 is the "artist price" and for everyone else it's $11k. Basically he only wants the paint used to make art.

by nancyminusone

8/18/2026 at 12:53:29 PM

A feature that no one is talking about but which is even cooler: You can use the same technology to a) directly simulate color blindness (drive the L and M cones with the same signal) and b) in theory drive subsets of a dichromat's L cones with derived L- and M- cone amplitudes - does that make them sort of trichromatic? Such an amazing technology! The whole AO story ultimately links back to the Starfire Optical Range : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfire_Optical_Range

by limbicsystem

8/17/2026 at 8:25:10 PM

Reminds me a bit of a Greg Egan story from Instantiation called Seventh Sight. Kids with artificial eyes hack them to see colors and spectrum not perceptible by humans.

by jeremyjh

8/17/2026 at 4:58:14 PM

This reads like an SCP article

by kveykva

8/17/2026 at 5:04:23 PM

Ah, thank you. Couldn’t put my finger on it.

by Luc

8/17/2026 at 9:03:46 PM

> The color is named after its theoretical LMS color space coordinates (0, 1, 0), which spells "olo" in leet speak.

:)

Hm, so is it correct to also call it ultragreen? In the same way that ultraviolet is the same effect but for short waves?

In this regard, it can’t be that novel of a discovery.

by purplethreads

8/17/2026 at 9:15:22 PM

Ultraviolet is prnamed that because of the Latin meaning of ultra as "beyond", as it's "beyond violet" in the spectrum, same as infrared is "below red".

This would be "sideways green" perhaps :)

by riffraff

8/17/2026 at 8:47:03 PM

I wonder why if this is the reason for the icon color of the game Olo. The left half of the icon background looks so similar.

https://www.eurogamer.net/olo-review

by pixelatedindex

8/17/2026 at 5:09:16 PM

Having read this comment from today detailing variance in the default Windows 95 background (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329282), I'm imagining Olo would be your wallpaper if "257 colors" could be supported.

by semolino

8/18/2026 at 1:44:14 PM

This reminds me of a thought I had as a child, that what I see as one color could be what everyone else sees as another color: this had blown my mind back then and thought I was a genius for coming up with it ^_^

by cpt_sobel

8/18/2026 at 2:55:38 PM

is there any way to disprove this?

by __alias

8/20/2026 at 8:32:35 AM

I guess the discussion would turn into a philosophical one about what the other person's conscience even means, and/or if other people are indeed conscient :)

by cpt_sobel

8/18/2026 at 12:29:48 AM

> Olo was discovered on April 18, 2025 by scientists at UC Berkeley.[1][3] The color is named after its theoretical LMS color space coordinates (0, 1, 0), which spells "olo" in leet speak.[4][3]

I presume "loo" and "ool" are in-gamut? What hex values?

by zahlman

8/18/2026 at 4:37:47 AM

703 nm laser is almost “loo”, and 417 nm is almost “ool”. Searching those wavelengths gives me #FF0000 and #6400FF. Loo is all red and ool is all violet.

by amoshebb

8/18/2026 at 2:56:16 AM

Since colors are an activation of rods and cones, could we simulate them by stimulating the eye nerves directly? Not necessarily to see new colors, but to replicate the experience of sight? If we managed that, wouldn't it feel exactly the same as seeing something in nature that itches the back of the eye so nicely? I suppose this is entering the brain interface territory.

by xpct

8/19/2026 at 10:20:58 AM

What confuses me with these triangles is: shouldn't the color space be 3-dimensional? One dimension for each cone? And then the real-world percievable colors are a 1d-manifold in there?

by teiferer

8/19/2026 at 6:39:59 PM

color is two-dimensional

it's easy to see: RGB somehow contains brightness information but that's not part of color, so one dimension less

by nom

8/19/2026 at 6:46:56 PM

Ok, sure, but those LMS triangles are just for hue..

So you are saying that 3d space has a 3d suspace of visible light?

by teiferer

8/17/2026 at 7:05:53 PM

This is how people talk about how ancient greeks viewed blue, except we actually can't see this color normally.

by throwaway27448

8/17/2026 at 7:36:43 PM

The stuff about ancient Greeks not seeing blue is absolute internet balderdash.

by MarkusQ

8/17/2026 at 9:31:17 PM

https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/history-english-colour...

> It’s not that people in the past couldn’t see blue. Indeed, there were several words which could refer to things we would call blue today, but these words could also describe things we’d assign to other colours too, especially grey and green.

by gherkinnn

8/18/2026 at 9:59:37 PM

Yes, hence my comment.

by throwaway27448

8/18/2026 at 6:39:01 PM

I don't get it. Is it saying Olo is an example of a color that can't be displayed on modern RGB displays?

I wonder if someone could sell pieces of paper which have this color?

by notfed

8/18/2026 at 7:24:19 PM

No. There are lots of colors that our eyes can see, but which no 3-color device can produce. They're usually highly saturated, and many of the deep greens can't be produced by 3-color devices.

What's going on here is different. The researchers managed to identify individual cones in the retinas of human subjects. They then shot tiny pulses of light at ONLY the M (green-sensitive) cones. This avoided stimulating the other cones, and subjects saw a color they could not have seen otherwise.

The issue here is that the S, M, and L cones have overlapping sensitivity curves: normally if you shine green light on the retina, all three cones will respond, and your brain will say "green". But here they are stimulating only one cone, not all 3.

by alejohausner

8/17/2026 at 5:46:24 PM

I wonder how long it will take until this is some kind of an amusement park thing or whatever.

by amberjack

8/17/2026 at 6:10:37 PM

"They then used lasers to deliver tiny doses of light"

I didn't know there was funding for this

by dylan604

8/17/2026 at 6:23:00 PM

> Funding: This work was supported by a Hellman Fellowship (R.N.), FHL Vive Center Seed Grant (R.N.), Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant FA9550-20-1-0195 (J.F., C.W., W.S.T., A.R., and R.N.), Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant FA9550-21-1-0230 (J.F., H.K.D., C.W., A.E.B., S.R.H., V.P.P., W.S.T., R.S., A.R., and R.N.), National Institutes of Health grant R01EY023591 (A.E.B., B.P.S., P.T., J.E.V., W.S.T., A.R., and R.N.), National Institutes of Health grant R01EY029710 (V.P.P. and R.S.), National Institutes of Health grant U01EY032055 (V.P.P., R.S., and A.R.), and a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface (R.S.).

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12007580/

by tantalor

8/18/2026 at 10:59:24 AM

Someone is trying to recreate "the seven colors of the earthly rainbow and the three extra colors you only get in Heaven" (from Scott Alexander's UNSONG).

by red_admiral

8/18/2026 at 4:34:56 AM

So weird. #00FFCC has been my terminal font color for nearly two decades now. Love the color and had no idea about the ‘imaginary’ color Olo.

by agiacalone

8/17/2026 at 9:49:18 PM

We know so much about color, but we're in the dark ages when it comes to odor.

by amelius

8/18/2026 at 4:05:51 PM

Olo? Sure, but did you ever see a Hooloovoo?

by strix_mahalo

8/18/2026 at 5:04:28 AM

Now I remembered how you see this color. You stare the some shape of 0xFF0030 and then close yores eyes and the inverted color appears.

by timonoko

8/18/2026 at 3:02:10 PM

Yes! I see purples and greens

by redthorn

8/17/2026 at 5:59:15 PM

Time for a trip then.

by pixel_popping

8/17/2026 at 4:30:02 PM

how bout Grorange

by goosethe

8/18/2026 at 4:55:49 AM

Same thing as “ultragreen” (as in ultraviolet)

by iridescentform

8/18/2026 at 12:13:55 PM

Wtf does this mean? “Their square display of olo occupied an angular width of 0.9°[1], around twice the diameter of the moon[7].”

by mbeavitt

8/18/2026 at 5:19:45 AM

Mix with yellow to get new color Yolo

This color does not give a fuck, I use it in my main CTA. People click it like 4000% more

by redthorn

8/17/2026 at 10:56:40 PM

is zoox olo colored?

by cat-whisperer

8/17/2026 at 5:44:38 PM

...

by timonoko

8/17/2026 at 5:56:21 PM

You can't have discovered this same color, solve it requires specialized equipment to see it.

The color in the Wikipedia article is just a rough approximation.

by SamBam

8/17/2026 at 6:05:40 PM

I know that. In pure form that color it is both yellow and blue without being green. You sometimes see it in sunsets.

by timonoko

8/17/2026 at 6:39:34 PM

No, because that's not understanding what this technology, and our cone cells, are doing.

For example, yellow has a wavelength of ~580nm. When that wavelength enters our eyes it activates both the M and the L cone cells, with the L slightly more. That differential activation between the two types of cells gives us the experience of yellow.

Blue actually activates all our cone cells, with S the most and a tiny bit of M and L.

What this technology does is selectively activate only the M cone cells.

There is no possible wavelength that activates only the M cone cells, because the combined activation spectrum of the S and L cone cells overlaps the entirely of the M spectrum. There's nothing natural that can enter our eyes and activate M without also activating L and/or S.

Therefore no one can ever have had the experience of having only their M cone cells activated with anything in the natural world. It can only have been done with this technology.

As for the experience of seeing olo, the qualia, that's almost arbitrary. The authors originally thought it was going to be the "greenest green" but it wasn't really. It wasn't possible to predict what the qualia would be, because the brain has never had that experience. For all they knew they might not have seen anything, because the brain could have just thrown up it's hands at this nonsense signal. Instead they happened to experience this teal-like color. But that wasn't a priori obvious. It's just the brain struggling to apply an experience to nonsense.

It is similar to tiring out the S and L cone cells and then looking away as you say elsewhere -- the authors mention that in the long-form article in The New Yorker -- but this is much clearer and more saturated.

by SamBam

8/17/2026 at 6:21:14 PM

---

by timonoko

8/17/2026 at 6:31:18 PM

Goddammit. Now I remembered how you see this color. You stare the some shape of 0xFF0030 and then close yores eyes and the inverted color appears.

by timonoko

8/17/2026 at 7:26:03 PM

You stare the some shape of 0xFF0030 and then close yores eyes and the inverted color appears.

So, the cover of R.E.M.'s 1988 record titled Green, which is actually orange. You're supposed to stare at it, then close your eyes, and you see the album cover as it's intended to be viewed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_(R.E.M._album)

by reaperducer

8/17/2026 at 6:44:05 PM

Can I get note in Wikipedia for inventing this 40 years ago?

by timonoko

8/17/2026 at 4:36:38 PM

lol

by dorianmariecom

8/17/2026 at 5:04:31 PM

lol is the complementary color of olo in the theoretical lms color space.

by trembolram

8/17/2026 at 7:24:32 PM

I guess it’s #FF0033 or so.

by kridsdale1

8/17/2026 at 5:02:56 PM

No, that's a different color.

by ihaveajob

8/18/2026 at 9:38:08 PM

[dead]

by ChristmasTomer

8/18/2026 at 3:38:08 PM

[dead]

by bunkydoo

8/17/2026 at 5:27:08 PM

> Only the five subjects of the Berkeley experiment have officially seen olo.

Basically equivalent to

source: trust me bro

by gste

8/17/2026 at 6:05:14 PM

There's a link to Dynomight's webpage in another comment thread. I've seen olo myself with it. It's to cyan what ultramarine is to sRGB blue.

by orthoxerox

8/17/2026 at 5:48:01 PM

The word "officially" is the massive wiggle-word here.

Only one person on Earth has officially seen the color of my coffee mug. Send me Venmo for $10, and I'll officiate your viewing of the attached JPG....

by IAmBroom

8/17/2026 at 10:02:33 PM

I'd heard of weasel words but now that you mention it they do tend to be rather wiggly

by soupspaces

8/17/2026 at 5:55:10 PM

Except that this requires extremely specialized equipment to individually trigger specific cone cells in your eyes, so I expect they have a pretty damn good idea of who has seen this and who hasn't.

by SamBam

8/17/2026 at 6:43:48 PM

So, source: trust me bro.

by moralestapia