Cutting Edge Lectures - Ren Ng presents: A tale of three novel colors (17 Nov 2026)

Tue, 17 Nov 2026 19:00:00 GMT

A tale of three novel colors: olo, keef and litz

This talk will be about research into novel human color perception. We showed human subjects a novel color, olo, by individually stimulating thousands of cells on the retina with laser microdoses, using a system we call Oz Vision. Olo corresponds to targeting only M cone cells and not L or S cones, which never happens in natural vision. Olo appears blue-green of unprecedented saturation. In theory, there are other novel colors that could not be as easily described. This talk will present the mathematical theory of two such tetrachromatic colors, keef and litz, and work towards prototyping them in the real world.

Ren Ng is a professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests are in imaging, graphics, human and computer vision. Research contributions include the novel color olo produced by the Oz Vision system, and the volumetric scene inference method NeRF. Before Berkeley, Ren was founder and CEO of Lytro, Inc., which commercialized his Ph.D. research on light field cameras. Ren completed his Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University, and received the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. Ren has received the Jim and Donna Gray Faculty Award for Undergraduate Teaching, Sloan Research Fellowship, IS&T Image Engineering Innovation Award, R.I.T.'s Imaging Hall of Fame, the Selwyn Award from the Royal Photographic Society, MIT Tech Review's TR35 and Entrepreneur of the Year, Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in Business, and is a Kavli Fellow and Optica Fellow.

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Cutting Edge Lectures - Ren Ng presents: A tale of three novel colors (17 Nov 2026)