Researchers say they've discovered a new color that no human has ever perceived

In brief: A team of researchers in the US claim to have unlocked a color that no human has ever seen before, and they did it using lasers. Not everyone, however, is convinced of the achievement or its merits.

Five individuals participated in the experiment, which involved shooting pulses of visible-wavelength laser light directly into their eyes to stimulate individual photoreceptor cells on the retina. According to the scientists, this method theoretically enables the display of colors that lie beyond the range of natural human vision.

The newly observed color, which was reportedly seen by the five subjects, is said to be a blue-green color with unprecedented saturation and has been named "olo."

One of the study's co-authors, Professor Ren Ng from the University of California, was also a participant. He said they predicted it would look like an unprecedented color signal but didn't know what the brain would do with it. The resulting visual was "jaw-dropping," he added.

Not everyone in the scientific community is convinced. John Barbur, a vision scientist at City St George's, University of London, told The Guardian that it is not a new color but rather, a more saturated green. The work, Barbur added, has "limited value."

Ng is well-respected in the field of optics. In 2006, he founded a company called Lytro that developed some of the first light-field cameras. Lytro introduced a novel technology that allowed images to be refocused after capture. Such tricks are commonplace nowadays on smartphones but at the time, the capability was fascinating.

According to the book "Inside Apple," Steve Jobs met with Ng in 2011 to discuss bringing the tech to the iPhone. Jobs died a few months after the meeting, seemingly before any sort of deal was agreed upon. Lytro eventually released a second-gen camera before pivoting to VR and eventually shutting down in 2018.

The team's work has been published in Science Advances in a paper titled, Novel color via stimulation of individual photoreceptors at population scale.

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