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.
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':
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
(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.)
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)?
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
> 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.).
> 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.
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.
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".
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: https://docs.moment.dev/d/hausdorff/2zmqjlmldchela29xvbzlbki...
> 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?
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.
99 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 13.5 ms ] threadhttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octarine
I suspect many animals experience color quite differently, including seeing infrared/ultraviolet, etc.
Note that those are possibly photosensitive epilepsy risks if you turn them up to 60/100.
(Context: negative afterimage, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterimage)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color#Chimerical_co...
https://www.skytopia.com/project/illusion/ipage-et.html
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.
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'.
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.)
Then I realized that wasn’t an optical illusion and instead just part of the setup…
https://www.reddit.com/r/FUCKYOUINPARTICULAR/comments/1dxlt6...
Basically equivalent to
source: trust me bro
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....
I was trying to find the color between red and violet, then I discovered that exact opposite is very weird.
Try 0xFF0030 and invert it.
https://youtu.be/wh4aWZRtTwU
I didn't know there was funding for this
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12007580/
> 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.
https://www.eurogamer.net/olo-review
:)
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.
This would be "sideways green" perhaps :)
I presume "loo" and "ool" are in-gamut? What hex values?
https://kagi.com/images?q=e5+h5+shinkansen&r=au&sh=fWcD0dVpC...