Researchers Shoot Lasers at People's Eyes to Help Them See a New Color

Think you've seen all the colors that exist? Maybe not. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Washington have created a new system that controls the eye's photoreceptors to help it see new colors, as reported in the journal Science Advances last week.

The system, called Oz, works by activating cone cells in the retina -- in short, firing laser pulses at researchers' eyes -- to push the eye past "spectral sensitivities" and to "elicit a color beyond the natural human gamut." 

In this case, respondents described the color as a "blue-green of unprecedented saturation." 

"For many decades, the studies of how humans see and how this capacity fails in disease have been conducted using ex vivo retinal samples extracted post-mortem or in animal models," said Dr. Ramkumar Sabesan, a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Washington School of Medicine who worked on this project. ("Ex vivo" refers to studies on cells that have been removed from a living body.)

Sabesan says Oz can help in testing the visual perception for patients who are undergoing therapy for retinal diseases. Oz aids in helping doctors and scientists by "compensating for the eye's inherent optical blur" and other miniature eye movements. 

"The use of the Oz for demonstrating the color Olo is just a tip of the iceberg in terms of the scientific and clinical discoveries that are now possible using the platform," he said.

A bright turquoise

Even those who worked on the research were impressed.

"We predicted from the beginning that it would look like an unprecedented color signal but we didn't know what the brain would do with it," said Ren Ng, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, in an interview with The Guardian. "It was jaw-dropping. It's incredibly saturated."

It's impossible to convey what the color looks like on a computer monitor, unfortunately. Either way, it looks like a bright turquoise. Researchers provided a swatch of what the color looks like.