Dagmar FraserAug 12, 2025

Terry Pratchett gave us octarine - the magical 8th colour of the spectrum, visible only to wizards and of course cats 🐱. UC Berkeley researchers have discovered "olo" - a real colour 🎨 that exists outside standard human vision… so far visible to only 5 people in the world! ✨

#MATLAB #MATLABambassador
James Fong and colleagues used Psychtoolbox (the MATLAB toolbox that I owe my job too!) to control their RGB projector during the colour matching experiments.

Show threadDagmar FraserAug 12, 2025

While Pratchett's octarine was "a sort of greenish-purple," olo is described as blue-green with unprecedented saturation.

The Oz system (this time please do look behind the curtain!) uses precisely targeted lasers to stimulate only M-cones in your retina, bypassing the normal colour mixing your brain does.

From fictional octarine to real olo – whimsical fantasy becomes science fact, one precisely controlled experiment at a time.

Show threadDagmar Fraser
MATLAB with Psychtoolbox doing some serious psychophysics wizardry! 🧙‍♂️
Aug 12, 2025 at 8:14pmWeb
Show threadDagmar FraserAug 12, 2025
📖 Full paper: https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.adu1052
🎯 Hat tip to this MATLAB blog coverage: https://blogs.mathworks.com/headlines/2025/08/11/only-five-people-in-the-world-have-seen-this-color/
🧰Psychtoolbox: http://psychtoolbox.org/
#Psychtoolbox #VisionScience #ColourPerception #TerryPratchett