Thursday, January 19, 2012

Red-Green show?

The human eye is not configured to see certain color mixtures because neurons excited by red light are suppressed by green photons, and so on. Red plus green equals a kind of brown, right?

But as the story describes, some researchers tried to fool the eye by narrowly striping red and green together, or blue and yellow together. Because of normal eye jitter, a cell that saw red a split second ago sees green the next, and the result looks brown or olive. But when they dynamically adjusted the image position using retinal tracking, to keep the same neurons stimulated by the same color stripes, the volunteers saw new colors for which they knew no names.

I wonder how expensive that rig is. I'd like to see it myself.

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4 comments:

  1. Texan999:53 AM

    You get an effect a little like that with some kinds of faintly iridescent silk, which look maroonish red from one angle and sage green from another. I was admiring a blouse like that just the other day.

    It makes you think of the fairy tale with the gown in "couleur du temps," sometimes translated as "color of weather." "Oiseau bleu, couleur du temps . . . ."

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  2. james11:37 AM

    Which story is that?

    If the technology is not unduly invasive (I hate having things touch my eyes) I'd love to volunteer for that project.

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  3. Texan9912:42 PM

    I think I'm actually mashing two fairy tales together. One is "L'oiseau bleu," popularized by Mme. Aulnoy, about a princess locked in a tower whose lover comes to her window every day in the form of a little blue bird when she calls:

    "Oiseau Bleu, couleur du temps,
    "Vole à moi promptement."

    http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/L’Oiseau_bleu_(Aulnoy)

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Bird_(fairy_tale)

    The other is Peau d'Âne (Donkeyskin), in which a girl wishes for three beautiful gowns, one the color of the sun, one the color of the moon, and the third "couleur du temps," sometimes rendered as "color of the sky" or "color of weather" or "color of heaven" -- or even "color of time," though that doesn't quite work. Illustrators of this tale sometimes try to show a gown in the shifting colors of clouds in the sky.

    http://horslesmurs.ning.com/profiles/blogs/1302569:BlogPost:71316

    A colleague of mine some years back had an artwork on his office wall consisting of three small framed square paintings, each of an indeterminate color and not much contrast, no figures or identifiable shapes at all. I am normally no big fan of abstract art, but I found this piece completely arresting and still think of it now, many years later. It made direct contact with some part of my mind I don't have conscious access to. Was it green? Was it red?

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  4. james4:23 PM

    Thanks for the reference; I wasn't familiar with those stories.

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