The ecstasy of “olo”
The color “olo” can’t be found on a Pantone color chart. It can be experienced only in a cramped 9-by-13 room in Northern California. That small space, in a lab on the UC Berkeley campus, contains a large contraption of lenses and other hardware on a table. To see olo, you need to scootch up to the table, chomp down on a bite plate, and keep your head as steady as you can. A laser will be fired into one of your eyes, targeting more than a thousand of your cone cells. (The scientists will have mapped their location on your retina in advance.) The lasers will activate your color vision like nothing in the natural world: A small square of exotic color will appear, just off-center from the focal point of your vision, against a background field of gray. It may flicker a bit, depending on what’s happening with the contraption, but it will remain unmistakably there.
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