Science in the City - Eyes & Skies

Austin Roorda

Creating New Colours Using Oz Vision

Can we see all the possible colours? …not even close… There are an infinite number of spectra (i.e. possible colours) in nature, but humans are constrained by having just three cone-types -- sensitive to long, middle and short wavelengths -- to sample them. How we overcome these constraints to differentiate millions of hues is nothing short of amazing, but what would happen if we expanded the number of cone types, or were able to alter their spectral sensitivities? Could the human brain make sense of this information and generate new percepts to attribute to them, in effect ‘inventing’ new colours that we can’t even imagine? I will talk about Oz Vision, a special display that we developed to test these ideas. Specifically, I will discuss recent experiments that led to the discovery of a new colour, which we named OLO.

Lisa Dang

Probing Alien Skies
In the last few decades, astronomers have discovered a rich diversity of planets vastly different from those residing in the Solar System. Among them a particularly intriguing type of planets discovered are lava worlds – scorching hot rocky planets but unlike the Earth these exoplanets are orbiting extremely close to their parent star and are blasted with irradiation levels that could sustain a magma ocean at the surface. Dr. Dang will share how we find these searing hot worlds, how we can study them with the JWST and what you could experience if you were to visit a lava world.

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Host or Publisher University of Waterloo, Faculty of Science