Project · 2025 · In progress
Colour Lab: The Blue is Sky Experiments
A long-form research program building six-fundamental colour perception through per-eye spectral filters, VR environments, and associative learning studies.
Motivation
The Colour Lab extends The Blue is Sky manifesto into hardware and field experiments. We design complementary multiband filters—one per eye—to create six effective cone fundamentals so participants can learn genuinely new chromatic categories. Rather than treat colour as fixed physics, we treat it as a learnable associative space and push on it until new qualia appear.
Spectral engineering
Using the Spectral Filter Statistical Study (v1 plan), we simulate hundreds of per-eye coatings against natural image statistics, daylight/LED illuminants, and physiological comfort constraints. Each candidate pair is scored for:
- Metamer splitting and mutual information gain relative to LMS vision.
- Comfort—binocular luminance balance, rivalry risk, migraine triggers.
- Stability across illuminants, manufacturing tolerances, and viewing angles.
We keep Pareto-optimal designs, send specs to vendors, and validate the coatings with spectrophotometer traces before they enter human trials.
Adaptation protocols
Participants wear the filters in graded sessions (lab + VR) while we measure:
- Unique-hue drift and asymmetric matching tasks.
- Object/affect confusability matrices (does “blue” still mean distant, calm, sky?).
- Physiological comfort (stereo acuity, SSQ scores) and neural correlates when available.
The hypothesis is that new ecological clusters—e.g., different foliage species, painted blues vs natural ones—acquire stable language and feeling. We document the emergence of new colour categories through essays, instrumentation, and installations.
Interfaces & outputs
The hardware and protocols bleed into public work: projection rooms where each eye sees different spectra, VR “qualia drift” experiences, and documentation that ties empirical findings back to the philosophical claim that colour = learned relation. The Colour Lab keeps feeding essays, talks, and agent prompts, ensuring that the institute’s theory of consciousness is grounded in experiments rather than slogans.