Unveiling Olo — A Color Out of Oz!

Summary

Summary of "Unveiling Olo — A Color Out of Oz!" from NPR's Short Wave

Release Date: June 6, 2025

In this captivating episode of Short Wave, hosts Emily Kwong and Wren Ng explore the groundbreaking discovery of a new color named Olo, delving into the intricate science of human color perception and the innovative techniques used to create this novel hue.

---

Introduction to Color Perception

Emily Kwong sets the stage by explaining that color is not only a physical phenomenon but also a complex perception crafted by our brains. Wren Ng emphasizes the challenges researchers face when studying color due to its context-dependent nature.

Wren Ng [00:38]: "It's actually very challenging to study color because of the complexity of it and how the perception is so context dependent."

The Discovery of Olo: A Novel Color

The episode introduces Dr. Austin Roerda, a professor of optometry and vision science at UC Berkeley, and his collaborator, computer scientist Wren Ng. Together, they have developed Olo, a color that does not exist in nature and was created entirely in a laboratory setting.

Austin Roerda [01:09]: "It's blue, green, it's a teal color, but it's just more saturated than any teal you can see in the natural world."

The Oz Technique

To achieve Olo, the team employed a technique aptly named Oz, inspired by the transformation from black and white to technicolor in "The Wizard of Oz."

Emily Kwong [01:16]: "Oz, named after the movie The Wizard of Oz, which starts in black and white until Dorothy emerges into a technicolor world. Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. We must be over the rainbow."

Wren Ng elaborates on the Oz technique, likening it to transitioning into an extraordinarily colored world by directly manipulating the cells responsible for color perception.

Wren Ng [01:46]: "Oz, in a way, is that effort to evoke a new sensation of color… through direct manipulation of the cells."

Understanding Human Color Vision

The discussion shifts to the biology of color perception. Wren Ng explains that humans have three types of cone photoreceptors—L (long), M (medium), and S (short) wavelengths—that enable us to perceive up to 10 million different hues through extensive brain processing.

Wren Ng [03:49]: "With just a mere three cone types, humans are able to differentiate arguably up to 10 million different hues in the visual world."

Austin Roerda adds that these cones are determined by photo pigments encoded in our DNA, highlighting that color vision is inherently genetic.

Austin Roerda [04:40]: "Our color vision is baked into our DNA. Literally."

Variations in Color Perception

The hosts explore how color perception varies among individuals, especially those with colorblindness. Austin Roerda explains that colorblind individuals, particularly those with dichromatic vision, perceive the world differently, often seeing it in shades limited to blue and yellow.

Austin Roerda [05:16]: "People see colors in the world and experience them differently… if you're a colorblind person, you see the world only in shades of blue and yellow."

Creating and Visualizing Olo

Emily inquires about the team's ambitious study to selectively stimulate M cones to produce Olo, a feat not naturally occurring. Austin Roerda discusses the experimental approach, acknowledging the unprecedented challenges and the collaborative effort required.

Austin Roerda [06:21]: "We set out to stimulate M cones without stimulating any neighboring L or S cones... It was so challenging, but the fruits of the labor are so valuable because it is really something that's never been done before."

Wren Ng details the meticulous process involved, including mapping each participant's cone cells using optical coherence tomography and precisely aligning their vision to target only the M cones. This precise stimulation resulted in the perception of Olo.

Wren Ng [07:03]: "Once everything gets into place and you're carefully fixating, then you have this moment where it just turns this saturated teal."

Perceiving Olo and Its Uniqueness

The team confirms the creation of Olo and addresses whether other animals could perceive this novel color. Austin Roerda clarifies that animal vision differs significantly from humans, making it impossible for other species to experience Olo as we do.

Austin Roerda [09:46]: "Animals don't see the world in color anything like a human does… the experiential nature of color for different species is just so vastly different."

Approximating the Olo Experience

For listeners eager to experience something similar to Olo, Wren Ng suggests a visual trick involving adapting to red light followed by green light. While this method doesn't perfectly replicate Olo, it offers a rough approximation by selectively desensitizing certain cones.

Wren Ng [11:25]: "If you adapt to red light and then look at green, you may desensitize to red and see something closer to Olo."

Cultural Impact and Homages to Olo

The episode highlights the cultural ripple effects of Olo, mentioning how artists like Stuart Semple are creating products inspired by this novel color. Semple's "Yolo Y" paint, priced at $10,000, aims to evoke the sensation of Olo through fluorescent components.

Wren Ng [13:02]: "Stuart Semple totally realized that, and his paint was meant to sort of evoke a sensation, a feeling of Olo."

Emily Kwong humorously references the emerging trend of "FOMOLO" (Fear of Missing Out on Olo), illustrating the color's growing fascination in popular culture.

Emily Kwong [14:00]: "Fear of missing out on Olo. That's what that is. FOMOLO."

Conclusion

Emily concludes by thanking Austin Roerda and Wren Ng for sharing their pioneering work, emphasizing the significance of their discovery in the realm of human color vision science.

Emily Kwong [14:06]: "Thank you for sharing Olo with us on Short Wave and with the world. We wish you luck with future adventures and advances in color and human color vision science."

---

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Austin Roerda [01:09]: "It's blue, green, it's a teal color, but it's just more saturated than any teal you can see in the natural world."

• Wren Ng [03:49]: "With just a mere three cone types, humans are able to differentiate arguably up to 10 million different hues in the visual world."

• Austin Roerda [05:16]: "If you're a colorblind person, you see the world only in shades of blue and yellow."

• Wren Ng [07:03]: "Once everything gets into place and you're carefully fixating, then you have this moment where it just turns this saturated teal."

• Austin Roerda [09:46]: "Animals don't see the world in color anything like a human does…"

• Wren Ng [11:25]: "If you adapt to red light and then look at green, you may desensitize to red and see something closer to Olo."

---

Conclusion

"Unveiling Olo — A Color Out of Oz!" offers listeners an enthralling glimpse into the forefront of vision science. By blending detailed scientific explanations with engaging storytelling, Short Wave not only introduces a revolutionary color but also highlights the limitless possibilities of human perception and technological innovation.

Transcript

[Austin Roerda]

Decades ago, Brazilian women made a discovery they could have an abortion without a doctor thanks to a tiny pill. That pill spawned a global movement helping millions of women have safe abortions regardless of the law. Hear that story on the network from NPR's Embedded and Futuro Media. Wherever you get your podcasts.

[Emily Kwong]

You'Re listening to Short Wave from npr. Color is a trick of the light and a creation of our brain.

[Wren Ng]

It's actually very challenging to study color because of the complexity of it and how the perception is so context dependent.

[Emily Kwong]

Austin Roerda is a professor of optometry and vision science at UC Berkeley, and he's likely the first person in the world to to ever see a new color, meaning a color that does not exist in nature and was developed entirely in a lab. Austin and his collaborator, computer scientist Ren? Ng, call this novel color olo.

[Austin Roerda]

It's blue, green, it's a teal color, but it's just more saturated than any teal you can see in the natural world.

[Emily Kwong]

And to make this supersaturated color, the team used a technique they call Oz, named after the movie the wizard of Oz, which, as you may remember, starts in black and white until Dorothy emerges into a technicolor world. Toto I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. We must be over the rainbow.

[Wren Ng]

And so Oz, in a way, to me, it's that effort to evoke a new sensation of color. And so we go from a normal colored world to this extraordinarily colored world through direct manipulation of the cells.

[Emily Kwong]

Was it like that for you? Like, I see the world in basic color and this is super saturated?

[Wren Ng]

Well, I would say yes, but, you know, we're not looking at this at an IMAX theater. Our display is the size of an icon on your cell phone or it's the size of your fingernail held at arm's length.

[Emily Kwong]

Today on the show, seeing how color perception works and how a swatch of color created by machines is pushing the boundaries of vision science. I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Short Wave from npr. This message comes from the Nature Conservancy. People from all walks of life depend on nature for the food they eat, the water they drink and the air they breathe, for strengthening their communities, powering their livelihoods and safeguarding their health. Nature is common ground for everyone, and uniting to protect nature can help solve today's challenges and create a thriving tomorrow for future generations. Discover [e-mail] NPR this message comes from Square. You probably know Square from your favorite local spots but you might not know that there's a lot more to square than meets the eye. What started as a little white card reader is now being used to rapidly scale, build loyal followings, cover cash flow gaps, and expand to new locations. Wherever your business is growing, square meets you there. Go to square.com go NPR to learn more. Okay, Austin and Wren, let's talk about color. What is color, Austin? And for those of us who can see color, how are we able to.

[Wren Ng]

So humans have three types of cone photoreceptor, and they're sensitive to the long, middle, and short wavelengths of the visible light spectrum. So they're called L, M, and S. And with these three types of sensor, we can send information to the brain that will inform the brain about color. So it's the brain that looks at the subtle differences in the excitation of those three cone types to generate a percept of the color. So with just a mere three cone types, humans are able to differentiate arguably up to 10 million different hues in the visual world. And that's really through the extensive processing that the brain does. It's a very important part of the process.

[Austin Roerda]

The three types of color cells in the retina, the reason they're sensitive to these three types of different parts of the visible spectrum is because they're filled with photo pigments, which are proteins. And those proteins come from our DNA from three genes. So literally, our color vision is baked into our DNA. Literally.

[Emily Kwong]

Are different people seeing different colors? If all three of us here were to look at a sunflower, would the yellow of the petals look a little different? Because are our cones unique to us in some way?

[Austin Roerda]

Absolutely. And the people see colors in the world and experience them differently, for sure. And if you're a colorblind person, that is what we call dichromatic or hard dichromatic is missing one of those three genes completely. Okay. And when that happens, then what is that vision like? Actually, it's really hard to know what the experience of having another person's vision is. It's sort of impossible. Right. And there's three types of this type of colorblindness. But the most common type would be an experience, we think, that sees the world only in shades of blue and yellow. Okay. So you don't see all the colors of the rainbow. You can't order the colors of the rainbow because you don't perceive them. Okay. You perceive them as shades of blue and yellow. So, absolutely, we're all seeing the world in different, you know, differently.

[Emily Kwong]

Fascinating. Okay, let's talk about your study, you set out to stimulate M cones without stimulating any neighboring L or S cones. And that doesn't happen in nature. So what did you want to know?

[Austin Roerda]

If you did that, I guess the question becomes, do you see a square of color? Or is your brain just confused about what you see there? Do you see a black hole? Or, you know, what is it? And I thought, well, you know, I guess you would see a color. And I wanted to know, hey, does that look like. What does it look like? Does it look like the greenest green you've ever seen? And I want to call out James Fong and Hannah Doyle amongst the many collaborators, but really, they stand as the people that did the hard work, had the perseverance and the smarts, the talent to really chase this down. It was so challenging, but the fruits of the labor is so valuable because it is really something that's never been done before. So there's no charted course to it.

[Emily Kwong]

Right. And you did see something. You saw olo. What's required to see this novel color?

[Wren Ng]

Yeah, there are a number of parts. First of all, in order to be able to consider even targeting only the mcones, you have to have a map of the cone mosaic of the three types of cones. So every subject in the study had to travel to the University of Washington to our collaborator's lab, where he has a device to image the retina. And with a special type of imaging called optical coherence tomography, he was able to label the cone types as being L, M, or s. So he kind.

[Emily Kwong]

Of mapped everyone's icons.

[Wren Ng]

That's right. So then when we go to the lab, in the lab here, there's a few steps. One is you need to dilate your pupil, and then we bite into a bite plate called a bite bar, which gets locked into the device so your head is held perfectly rigid. And then somebody else will align you in X, Y, and Z to get your pupil aligned with the output aperture of the system.

[Emily Kwong]

This really reminds me of going to the eye doctor to test my vision. Go on.

[Wren Ng]

That's right. And then now there's one little important fact, is that classifying the cones or generating maps of the cones is difficult. And nobody has ever mapped the cones right along the line of sight in an area called your fovea, because the cones are really densely packed there. So we instead we mapped the cones a little bit away from the fovea, about a half a millimeter away from the center of the fovea. And initially, while everything's getting set up, things look green or just a regular green. Then once everything gets into place and you're carefully fixating, then you have this moment where it just turns this saturated teal. And I was aware at that moment that we had. We had succeeded, that we had created, and that we were able to stimulate only the M cones. And James Fong, the lead author on the paper, he invented the name Olo because it's a binary code for 0, 1, 0, which represent the stimulation of the L, M, and S cones.

[Emily Kwong]

That's so smart. And as I understand it, you also had this teal laser next to olo, and it was a laser containing the most saturated natural light you were able to generate. So study participants could compare the col. Right. That's kind of how you show that OLO isn't just teal, it's a completely different color.

[Wren Ng]

That's right.

[Emily Kwong]

What do you say to folks who wonder if OLO exists in nature in such a way that maybe other animals could see it?

[Austin Roerda]

I love that question. To be clear, animals don't see the world in color anything like a human does. Right. Nothing like a human does. Animal eyes are vastly different than ours. And even our closest cousins on the evolutionary tree, their genes for those photopigments that we talked about earlier, they're not the same as for us. They don't have the same number as us, and they don't have the same genetic sequence. So its functional effect is. In the world for detecting light is totally different. We know that, like hummingbirds, people have probably heard or may have heard. Some species can see in UV light. We're blind to UV light as one example, but every animal sees it completely differently. Another way to think about it is that, you know, we all look at a tv, we're like, wow, that color's pretty good. When your dog or your cat is sitting there looking at that tv, they do not see that and be like, wow, that kind of looks like, you know, that photo that we all took together outside the house this morning. It just. The colors don't look right. Okay.

[Emily Kwong]

How do you know? My cat can play the same video games as me. I think he's following.

[Austin Roerda]

He might be following, but the colors won't look the same.

[Emily Kwong]

Yeah.

[Austin Roerda]

So back to this question about, you know, could there be, you know, an animal that could see ologies? I received that question first. Oh, what a great question. But it's actually that there's no way for that to happen because the experiential nature of the color for different species is just so vastly different.

[Emily Kwong]

Yeah, I recognize that you need a machine to see olo, but for those of us at home, is there any way to approximate the OLO experience and to trick your eyes?

[Wren Ng]

Now, there's one type of situation where you can get an impression of what OLO might be, and that is if you desensitize or if you're exposed to a bright red light for a period of time.

[Emily Kwong]

I'm going to do this at home. I want to see OLO so bad. Okay.

[Wren Ng]

So if you look at red light and you kind of adapt to red light by looking at red light too much for a long period of time, you may desensitize to it or adapt to it. And then immediately following the adaptation to red light, you show a green light. And that approximates the condition that we generate with olo, whereby the mcones are preferentially stimulated more than what normal natural light would do. And so, if you wanted to get a rough idea of what OLO looked like, you could do this adaptation trick. Now, the difference is that when we deliver olo, we can make it last. It can persist.

[Emily Kwong]

Wow, you speak like such a steward of a color. And it's so. It's funny to me because, like, the pop culture craze around, seeing OLO has gotta be pretty funny for you all to witness. I read about an artist from the UK, Stuart Semple, who is selling for $10,000 pre orders of a paint based on Olo called Yolo Y, which is, you know, you only live.

[Austin Roerda]

Oh, I know. We love that.

[Emily Kwong]

What has been the funniest OLO homage or OLO plea that you've read about or seen?

[Wren Ng]

Well, I think I loved yolo. The. The reason I loved it. Of course, you can't make a paint that recreates olo, but, no, it seems.

[Emily Kwong]

Like saturation is such a big part of this.

[Wren Ng]

That's right. It's all about saturation.

[Emily Kwong]

It's not the hue.

[Wren Ng]

That's right. Stuart Semple totally realized that, and his paint was meant to sort of evoke a sensation, a feeling of olo. And from what he describes, he kind of achieved that by adding some fluorescent components. Some say, well, olo's no different than Taco Bell's Baja Blast. Okay. Some people say I had the color Olo on my Nike sneakers back in 2015. And so it's all been fun.

[Emily Kwong]

They're experiencing FOMO. Olo. That's what that is. FOMOLO.

[Wren Ng]

Yes, we've had a bit of that.

[Emily Kwong]

Fear of missing out on olo.

[Wren Ng]

That's right.

[Emily Kwong]

Thank you for sharing OLO with us on Short Wave and with the world. And we wish you luck with future adventures and advances in color in human color vision science.

[Wren Ng]

Well, it's been a real pleasure to talk to you.

[Austin Roerda]

Thanks for having us on.

[Emily Kwong]

Emily Short Wavers Please like, follow or subscribe to our show now. You will get a fun and fresh science episode in your feed four times a week. Today's episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts, Kwesi Lee with the audio engineer, Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior Vice president of Podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks for listening to Short Wave from N. I'm Tonya Moseley, co host of Fresh Air. At a time of sound bites and short attention spans, our show is all about the deep dive. We do long form interviews with people behind the best in film, books, tv, music and journalism. Here our guests open up about their process and their lives in ways you've never heard before. Listen to the Fresh Air podcast from NPR and whyy. Hey, it's Sarah Gonzalez. The economy has been in the news a lot lately. It's kind of always in the news, and Planet Money is always here to explain it. Each episode we tell a sometimes quirky, sometimes surprising, always interesting story that helps you better understand the economy. So when you hear something about cryptocurrency or where exactly your taxes go, Yas Aves Listen to the Planet Money podcast from NPR.