While working as a lighting director for a small event venue, a choreographer asked me to use brown light for one of her pieces. I never did figure out how to make the "impossible color" of light for the production.
Thank you! I think your example is the most intuitively understandable brain melter in this arena. Magenta is Red and Blue together, the absence of Green. Yet on the spectrum, Green is halfway between Red and Blue, right where you might expect Magenta to be given that it is made up of Red and Blue. So why doesn't the brain perceive Magenta as the color known on the spectrum as Green?
Another color like this is Brown: You get it from mixing all the colors of paint together, yet there is no point on the light spectrum that looks brown.
And thank you for reminding us that all these so called impossible colors are perfectly well defined and fully "possible" (since they exist) in the electromagnetic spectrum.
When I cross my eyes for the red-green color, it first shades from red to green across, then it flickers between red and green, and then settles into a kinda orange-ish color for a moment before my eyes can't take being crossed any longer. the orange-ish color is, perhaps, the alleged impossible color, but it wasn't that impressive. Maybe I can't see it. Interesting nonetheless.
To me the lede was buried: TIL that a new color Olo was created in April 2025 by using a retina tracking laser to only hit the "Green" receptors in the eye (which normally are accompanied by some signal to the "Red" and "Blue").
I can't be the first to imagine how cool it would be to have your AR glasses use laser cone tracking to give you superhuman vision, highlighting objects with a color that has never before existed at the retina level.
And this tech gives new meaning to the idea of a "Retina" display. By scanning and actuating the retina at the rod and cone level, you could conceivably have a virtual display that crushes current limitations on color space, dynamic range, viewing angle, optical distortion, and even resolution.
While working as a lighting director for a small event venue, a choreographer asked me to use brown light for one of her pieces. I never did figure out how to make the "impossible color" of light for the production.
Magenta is a color that exists only in the brain. It can’t be found on the electromagnetic spectrum.
Thank you! I think your example is the most intuitively understandable brain melter in this arena. Magenta is Red and Blue together, the absence of Green. Yet on the spectrum, Green is halfway between Red and Blue, right where you might expect Magenta to be given that it is made up of Red and Blue. So why doesn't the brain perceive Magenta as the color known on the spectrum as Green?
Another color like this is Brown: You get it from mixing all the colors of paint together, yet there is no point on the light spectrum that looks brown.
And thank you for reminding us that all these so called impossible colors are perfectly well defined and fully "possible" (since they exist) in the electromagnetic spectrum.
When I cross my eyes for the red-green color, it first shades from red to green across, then it flickers between red and green, and then settles into a kinda orange-ish color for a moment before my eyes can't take being crossed any longer. the orange-ish color is, perhaps, the alleged impossible color, but it wasn't that impressive. Maybe I can't see it. Interesting nonetheless.
To me the lede was buried: TIL that a new color Olo was created in April 2025 by using a retina tracking laser to only hit the "Green" receptors in the eye (which normally are accompanied by some signal to the "Red" and "Blue").
I can't be the first to imagine how cool it would be to have your AR glasses use laser cone tracking to give you superhuman vision, highlighting objects with a color that has never before existed at the retina level.
And this tech gives new meaning to the idea of a "Retina" display. By scanning and actuating the retina at the rod and cone level, you could conceivably have a virtual display that crushes current limitations on color space, dynamic range, viewing angle, optical distortion, and even resolution.