A New Spectrum

Daedalus has been investigating color vision, and points out that our current model of color perception is incomplete. Color is normally understood using the tristimulus model which assumes that we perceive color using the red-, green- and blue-sensitive cones in the retina. However this model neglects that fact that the eye also contains rods, which are sensitive to monochrome light. So there are actually four types of receptor, rather than three.

Daedalus speculates that our experience of color actually takes into account all four channels. This would explain why reproduced scenes are rarely mistaken for the real thing, despite recent gains in dynamic range and resolution.

So a color system that could independently stimulate these four color channels should be able to reproduce the true gamut of perceived color. What was previously thought of as the “RGB” 3D color cube, with one axis for the three primaries, is actually only a tiny slice of the possible “RGBL” 4D color tesseract.

Therefore DREADCO physiologists have been carefully combining laser light to independently stimulate the eye’s four channels, making available a much more realistic range of colors for digital displays. But in addition these new displays can also present colors utterly impossible in nature, such as a black that is also yellow, and a pure white that is also deep red. Observers have difficulty describing these new colors, since they match nothing that they have ever perceived before.

Meanwhile DREADCO’s chemical engineering group has been working the same trick for the pigment dyes used for clothing, cars and makeup. The impact in the ever novelty-seeking world of fashion should be nothing short of stupendous, with a huge range of indescribable colors suddenly available only from DREADCO.