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- Hacker News
- My debatable factoid is that all vision is movement-dependent, including human vision, and so the bigness and wonderfulness of the tyrannosaur's eyes is beside the point of whether it needed its prey to move around in order to perceive it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilized_images , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_(visual) , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsaccade
We fake the movement of anything we're staring at, by means of tiny automatic eye movements, in order to remain able to see the thing at all.
by card_zero - These are really interesting.
I've noticed when I'm spacing out and staring at a single point for a while that there's some kind of "tunnel vision" that develops, where everything besides the small point I'm looking at starts to darken and if I shift my body suddenly everything that was fading will "refresh." I always thought it felt similar to when a particularly bright light "burns in" your vision for a moment. Sounds a lot like the phenomenon described in the Stabilized Image article. Neat stuff!
by kowbell - ACES AP0 is the only color space I know that is designed to represent all possible visible colors. It's a purely theoretical color space, though. The widest color space designed for actual implementation, Rec. 2020, still can't faithfully show most of the natural greens and cyans, like your green laser pointer.by orthoxerox
- > Today, on your way home, look at the “green” light on a traffic signal. It’s not green.
Independently from this, the names for colors are culturally determined.
The Japanese call green traffic lights as 青 "ao", blue.
Russians have different terms for different shades of blue.
by fmajid - This is a good point. Here's the article on the weirdness of blue/green in different cultures:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
by qingcharles - That was incredibly well-explained. Kudos.
I do have a question that the article doesn't seem to attempt to answer, though. The article says (paraphrased in my new understanding) that any spectra which makes the cones in your eyes react the same way will result in seeing the same colour. Do we know of any examples of this?
(Colour-blindness seems like an obvious example; I'm curious though if there are any examples of two common scenarios where it can be demonstrated that there are different spectra in each, and yet most people will see them as the same colour.)
by Sophira - Would not the definitive answer to this be a computer screen.
On one side you have an apple, illuminated by natural sunlight. it fills your eye with a rich texture of subtly mixed frequency's covering the whole gamut of visible and invisible light. On the other a picture of an apple composed of brutal pure frequencies only emitting at 430, 540, 570 Nm. Can you tell the difference?
by somat - Everyone is pointing out examples around image reproduction, which are valid and interesting… but the case that comes up in nature is violet (beyond blue in spectrum) vs purple (mix of red and blue) pigments.by addaon
- Well, the most common example si precisely screens, no? A screen displaying the color yellow is actually a spectrum of red and green peaks, stimulating your red and green cones just like a spectrum containing a single frequency of the color yellow.by frotaur
- A flower, a picture of the flower in print and the picture shown on a screen will all have different spectra, but look the same.
See the first minutes of this video, where he has a spectrum analyser: https://youtu.be/-DyrBDsKA5s?si=mRJPT2ecy6NqpB4N
by 317070 - This is called metamerism. It can be a practical issue if two pigments have the same color under one light source, but a different one under another. You want your artificial teeth to have the same color as your real teeth in sunlight, led light, and a classic lightbulb for example.by grumbelbart2
- Incredible article. I used to work as a light designer and therefore spent lot of time thinking about colors and training my eyes to see them more precisely. I lost some of this competency surprisingly quickly, but this article brought many great feelings/souvenirs back.
Thanks to the author
by Yinameah - Off topic, but the other articles are well made too. I enjoyed this one: https://moultano.wordpress.com/2025/02/24/you-should-make-cr...by olejorgenb
- Really enjoyed the article, even though it's not a new topic to me, but still it was very interesting, very nicely written and I still managed to pick up a couple of new details.
To be fair to Jurassic Park, though, at least in the book the quirks of T-Rex's vision were explained by the details of genetic engineering (the base DNA used was some kind of amphibian, that allegedly had this problem — still not very scientifically plausible, but not quite as silly as in the movie). It goes a long way to emphasize that in the end these are not real dinosaurs, these are human-made abominations.
by krick - Doesnt Dr Grant scare a kid in the beginning with the Velociraptor and say there that T Rex vision was movement based? I wonder if Chrichton made that up or if it was a real theory by paleaologists?by ralfd
- Really nice article, I'll look closer to green lights next time I see one.
The most striking experience I had was working with a blue laser (430nm). The best way I found to describe its color is that it was screaming "blue" at me. Since then, I'm always disappointed when looking at a screen displaying #0000FF.
by lefra - "This is a good time to spare a thought for our red-green colorblind brethren. [...] it is to them that we owe the beautiful color of green traffic lights. The spectral requirements that make the green signals distinguishable from red in their eyes make them beautiful in ours."by olejorgenb
- Sounds like we need the next VR glasses to shine colorful lasers into our eyes instead of screens.by tomaskafka
- The phosphor screen of a B&O MX8000 TV (a Philips tube) was unlike any I’ve ever seen in terms of cyan intensity. That was in 2020 while the tv is from the 1980’s. Playing Donkey Kong on it was totally different than any other screen. It was like a Morpho butterfly, but in the article it is pointed out that phosphor screens have limited color range.
Triangles between screens may differ with tuning, but I suppose they all are limited in range. I’ve yet to experiment if this experience was a “brand experience” because I liked the TV or that the colors are indeed more intense than even some HDR/DV flat screen from the past few years.
This article was so well written that it gives a lot of energy to make this comparison for real. Absolutely masterful writing and all of the plenty examples make me want to look for colors I’ve missed out on while watching so many screens.
What the article does very well is vibrantly describe what you are missing and then post an image of it, such as a beach. Looking at that image, it falls absolutely flat compared to memories and the imagination of those places. This makes it tangible how limited screens really are.
Edit: added last paragraph
by Stitch4223 - The original 1953 NTSC standard specified phosphors with a way bigger gamut than sRGB, that were chosen to approximate the gamut of film projectors.
Original NTSC cyans are more saturated than even DCI-P3 cyans.
Typical CRTs use the cheaper, brighter phosphors specified by SMPTE C (the basis for the sRGB gamut) and a circuit that pumps the saturation to compensate.
It's likely your screen uses the better phosphors instead of a colour correction circuit.
by Giefo6ah - I’m not sure it’s possible to truthfully describe what we are missing in reality with a photo.
You can publish a photo with default automatic JPEG processing, say by a phone, and it will certainly look flat. You could also present a masterful interpretation of raw sensor data that uses the most out of the available display space, and the impression might be different.
There is no objectively correct way to represent reality in a photo; even the concept of neutral grey is not a real thing as soon as perception is concerned. A default camera interpretation of light is baseline and safe to maximally avoid awkward edge cases. We all know that time we photograph a bright pink sunset but our phone renders it as pale yellow or orange. However, give the same shot human attention, and even though it may never be as pink as what you have perceived in reality it will pop enough that the viewer will have a similar response.
It is photographer’s job to work raw data in specific ways and make what impressed you stand out to your audience, arranging colours both relative to each other and in absolute display space, however limited it is. Human eyes are incredibly adaptive: we lower our relevant thresholds, adjust our idea of neutral grey—in short, we adapt to given display medium, to given photographic style, etc., and in the end perceive a true lush lagoon in a photo even if our eyes only receive a truly minuscule amount of colour range present in the scene.
by strogonoff - What I missed in the article: the curves of the three “cone kinds” overlap. What if you could stimulate kinds of cones individually to see entirely new colors? Some people shoot layers at them into eyes. But you can also try this website: https://dynomight.net/colors/ (previously on HN but search fails me).by rollulus
- by mr_toad
- Last year a research group managed to do just that, see https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu1052 for details.by lefra
- Through the magic of liner algebra it turns out that you can stimulate cones independently even with normal displays. Search for 'silent substitution'!by limbicsystem
- I took up acrylics painting a few years back and I've been surprised by how much is lost in photos and videos. The two colors with which I've noticed this the most are ultramarine blue and prussian blue. I don't think it's just the color though, part of it comes down to how light is reflected off the painting and where you're standing, as well as the texture and the brush strokes. I have a few paintings hanging in my room and occasionally I'll look at them for a while and it'll reveal a new perspective to me that I had previously missed, despite being the one who made it.
This post is making me feel a bit inspired to go outside and immerse myself in the forest to take in the greens. Thanks for sharing.
- Thanks mentioning acrylics. Now I'm wondering if new technology will eventually improve our printing to allow better colors in news media, and even in prints in art exhibits?
Does anyone have any comments on the future of printed media?
by jakzurr - While it is true that some saturated blue-green colors will never be reproducible with only 3 primary colors, the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram used in TFA overemphasizes their importance, because human vision cannot distinguish many colors in that area of the diagram.
In reality, the greatest defect of the sRGB color space, which is still too frequently the default color space, is that it is not able to reproduce many saturated orange/red/purple colors, which are very frequently encountered around us, e.g. in flowers, fruits and clothes.
The missing orange-red-purple corner appears small in the diagram in comparison with the missing blue-green corner, but in reality humans perceive much more different colors in the orange/red/purple corner, so the relation between those areas would be opposite in a uniform color space.
The Display P3 color space is much better than sRGB for reproducing orange/red/purple colors and now it is available even in many cheap monitors. However many monitors that can reproduce Display P3 come configured by default to use just sRGB. Such monitors should always be reconfigured to use Display P3.
Monitors that can reproduce an even greater part of the Rec. 2020 color space are obviously better than those that can do only Display P3, but such monitors with a higher color gamut are usually more expensive. The full Rec. 2020 color space can be reproduced only with laser projectors, because it uses monochromatic primary colors.
by adrian_b - As I understand it, JPEG cuts out a lot of detail in the blue range, because we don't see it as well. Is that due to the same thing as you're saying here?by jfengel
- Stupid question: does the computer or whatever the monitor is hooked up to need to know to do something special to then show those colors, or it's just normal rgb color levels and in a less-good-color-space monitor those would have been shifted to less accurate colors?by kadoban