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Color is a trick of the light and a creation of our brain.

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

Austin Rurda is a professor of optometry and vision science at UC Berkeley, and he's likely

the first person in the world 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 Ong, call this novel color Olo.

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.

And to make this super saturated 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.

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 self.

Was it like that for you?

Like I see the world in basic color and this is super saturated?

Well, I would say yes, but we're not looking at this in an IMAX theater.

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