Olo (Color) (en.wikipedia.org)

456 points by inigyou 6 days ago

GolfPopper 18 hours ago

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...

Georgelemental 18 hours ago

tgv 14 minutes ago

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)?

yboris 17 hours ago

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

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

deIeted 4 hours ago

MisterTea 13 hours ago

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.

EvanAnderson 6 hours ago

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.

formerly_proven 13 hours ago

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.

eru 6 hours ago

deIeted 4 hours ago

saidnooneever 3 hours ago

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'.

elliottkember 2 hours ago

NetOpWibby 3 hours ago

reoKaneshiro 15 hours ago

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

rashkov 16 hours ago

wow, highly recommended

toxik 18 hours ago

This was very interesting, thank you for the link.

pwillia7 15 hours ago

incredible

antics 14 hours ago

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...

drayfield 19 hours ago

Is it too late to rename it to Octarine?

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

phikappa 19 hours ago

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

riffraff 14 hours ago

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

indrora 18 hours ago

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.

dejobaan 17 hours ago

ChrisMarshallNY 19 hours ago

+1 for the Sir Terry reference.

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

tiagod 17 hours ago

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

ameliaquining 10 hours ago

I thought of "The Colour Out of Space".

Razengan 17 hours ago

My thoughts as soon as I saw the title :)

hdz 18 hours ago

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...

c22 15 hours ago

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.

jhiesey 16 hours ago

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.

rebeccajae 12 hours ago

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.

zimpenfish 2 hours ago

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.

22039dj9j3d 13 hours ago

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

kridsdale1 16 hours ago

kiddico 16 hours ago

Lol $11280.99 now marked down to $33.99!

tclancy 9 hours ago

vismit2000 3 hours ago

jen729w 8 hours ago

Aha! I was trying to figure out the colour of the E5/H5 Shinkansen that are used on the Tokyo-Morioka-Aomori (Hayabusa/Yamabiko) line. This is it.

https://kagi.com/images?q=e5+h5+shinkansen&r=au&sh=fWcD0dVpC...

jeremyjh 15 hours ago

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.

kveykva 18 hours ago

This reads like an SCP article

Luc 18 hours ago

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

pixelatedindex 14 hours ago

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

zahlman 10 hours ago

> 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?

amoshebb 6 hours ago

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.

xpct 8 hours ago

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.

purplethreads 14 hours ago

> 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.

riffraff 14 hours ago

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 :)

evanb 12 hours ago

This page, which predates the recent olo work, calls it psychedelic aquamarine. https://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/colour/primary.html

semolino 18 hours ago

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.

m-hodges 17 hours ago

agiacalone 6 hours ago

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.

throwaway27448 16 hours ago

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

MarkusQ 15 hours ago

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

gherkinnn 13 hours ago

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.

dylan604 17 hours ago

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

I didn't know there was funding for this

tantalor 17 hours ago

> 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/

amberjack 17 hours ago

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

amelius 13 hours ago

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

iridescentform 6 hours ago

Same thing as “ultragreen” (as in ultraviolet)

goosethe 18 hours ago

how bout Grorange

redthorn 6 hours ago

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

cat-whisperer 12 hours ago

is zoox olo colored?

pixel_popping 17 hours ago

Time for a trip then.

timonoko 6 hours ago

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.

timonoko 17 hours ago

...

SamBam 17 hours ago

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.

timonoko 17 hours ago

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

SamBam 16 hours ago

timonoko 17 hours ago

dorianmariecom 18 hours ago

lol

trembolram 18 hours ago

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

kridsdale1 16 hours ago

I guess it’s #FF0033 or so.

ihaveajob 18 hours ago

No, that's a different color.

gste 18 hours ago

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

Basically equivalent to

source: trust me bro

orthoxerox 17 hours ago

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.

IAmBroom 17 hours ago

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....

SamBam 17 hours ago

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.

moralestapia 16 hours ago

soupspaces 13 hours ago

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