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':
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'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.
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.
> 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.).
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....
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.
No, because that's not understanding what this technology, and our cone cells, are doing.
For example, yellow has a wavelength of ~580nm. When that wavelength enters our eyes it activates both the M and the L cone cells, with the L slightly more. That differential activation between the two types of cells gives us the experience of yellow.
Blue actually activates all our cone cells, with S the most and a tiny bit of M and L.
What this technology does is selectively activate only the M cone cells.
There is no possible wavelength that activates only the M cone cells, because the combined activation spectrum of the S and L
cone cells overlaps the entirely of the M spectrum. There's nothing natural that can enter our eyes and activate M without also activating L and/or S.
Therefore no one can ever have had the experience of having only their M cone cells activated with anything in the natural world. It can only have been done with this technology.
As for the experience of seeing olo, the qualia, that's almost arbitrary. The authors originally thought it was going to be the "greenest green" but it wasn't really. It wasn't possible to predict what the qualia would be, because the brain has never had that experience. For all they knew they might not have seen anything, because the brain could have just thrown up it's hands at this nonsense signal. Instead they happened to experience this teal-like color. But that wasn't a priori obvious. It's just the brain struggling to apply an experience to nonsense.
It is similar to tiring out the S and L cone cells and then looking away as you say elsewhere -- the authors mention that in the long-form article in The New Yorker -- but this is much clearer and more saturated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color#Chimerical_co...
https://www.skytopia.com/project/illusion/ipage-et.html
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octarine
Note that those are possibly photosensitive epilepsy risks if you turn them up to 60/100.
I suspect many animals experience color quite differently, including seeing infrared/ultraviolet, etc.
https://youtu.be/wh4aWZRtTwU
I didn't know there was funding for this
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12007580/
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.
The color in the Wikipedia article is just a rough approximation.
For example, yellow has a wavelength of ~580nm. When that wavelength enters our eyes it activates both the M and the L cone cells, with the L slightly more. That differential activation between the two types of cells gives us the experience of yellow.
Blue actually activates all our cone cells, with S the most and a tiny bit of M and L.
What this technology does is selectively activate only the M cone cells.
There is no possible wavelength that activates only the M cone cells, because the combined activation spectrum of the S and L cone cells overlaps the entirely of the M spectrum. There's nothing natural that can enter our eyes and activate M without also activating L and/or S.
Therefore no one can ever have had the experience of having only their M cone cells activated with anything in the natural world. It can only have been done with this technology.
As for the experience of seeing olo, the qualia, that's almost arbitrary. The authors originally thought it was going to be the "greenest green" but it wasn't really. It wasn't possible to predict what the qualia would be, because the brain has never had that experience. For all they knew they might not have seen anything, because the brain could have just thrown up it's hands at this nonsense signal. Instead they happened to experience this teal-like color. But that wasn't a priori obvious. It's just the brain struggling to apply an experience to nonsense.
It is similar to tiring out the S and L cone cells and then looking away as you say elsewhere -- the authors mention that in the long-form article in The New Yorker -- but this is much clearer and more saturated.